AOS/VS! That brings back memories. I used it in college back in the
1980's on an MV/8000. Later at a reseller I worked for I had an MV/4000
in-house and various other MV's that were in various stages of being
sent to customers. My last contact with AOS/VS would have been with
release 6.0.0.0 or 7.0.0.0 in late 1987. Sadly I have forgotten a lot
about it though I still have reams of code I wrote back in the day as
well as some internals tools written in macro. I did have some fun
patching the kernel to add "Load System Ring" privilege to PID 2 as well
as add an IO privilege to my profile that PREDITOR did not offer but
EXEC was more than happy to pass on to its children.
One thing that was quite advanced for its days was support of "Tasks"
which we now call "Threads". The ability to have a program run several
sections of code simultaneously was an incredible concept though
necessary in order to implement Control-C/Control-A handlers.
Cross-task synchronization and deadlocking were all issues I learned
about before they again became issues for the "multi-threading" community.
If there ever was such an emulator I would not mind trying it out.
Currently I play with the PDP11 and VAX emulators as I would up spending
much more time working with DEC equipment than DG. As such, I have
retained a lot more knowledge about RSTS/E and VMS than I have about AOS/VS
Robert
On 5/11/2012 4:27 AM, Steve Merrony wrote:
I have heard it said that most successful OS efforts begin with with
someone who 'has an itch to scratch'. My persistent itch is a curious
desire to have AOS/VS running in some form.
Over the years there has been a small amount of discussion on this
forum about 32-bit DG, but it always peters out with someone saying
they are in touch with ex-DG IP holders and then "nothing continues to
happen"... Given the historical interest in the creation of the Eagle
this seems to me to be a crying shame.
I have been pondering a way forward; as I see it there are two options:
1. We go ahead with an MV simulator in SimH. There is a lot of intact
hardware documentation freely available on the net so I would have
thought this is technically feasible. The problem is software, but
there are a few MVs around the world now run by enthusiasts - maybe
they could be persuaded to share privately until an official solution
is worked out?
2. A non-SimH route: we re-implement AOS/VS on modern hardware! The
whole OS, not just the CLI. This is clearly a wildly different
option, and at least as much work as option 1, but I think it could be
a fascinating project in its own right.
Anyone interested?
--
/Stephen Merrony
/
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