sdl@MITRE-BEDFORD.arpa (Litvintchouk) (11/10/86)
I am interested in the characteristics of UTS, the Unix-like operating
system available for Amdahl mainframes. Does anyone know of studies
comparing UTS to implementations of Unix System V, or Berkeley 4.2
Unix? Is UTS a "real" Unix, and does it resemble System V or Berkeley
4.2? What kinds of differences might be noticeable to: a user, a
system administrator, a system programmer, etc.?
Please reply directly to me, as I am usually not a subscriber to this
mailing list. Thanx very much in advance!!!
Steven Litvintchouk
MITRE Corporation
Burlington Road
Bedford, MA 01730
(617)271-7753
ARPA: sdl@mitre-bedford
UUCP: ...{cbosgd,decvax,genrad,ll-xn,philabs,security,utzoo}!linus!sdllacasse@RAND-UNIX.arpa (11/14/86)
We evaluated UTS for quite a while here, back in 1982 or so. This is my
personal opinion, and not that of Rand.
The biggest problem we had is that our IBM hardware didn't have full
duplex tty lines. We wanted to use screen-oriented software (both that
did, and did not use the curses library). We tried leasing a fancier
full-duplex terminal controller, but it was very expensive. One fellow
here hooked up two tty lines to one terminal, and ran the Rand Editor on
it that way. This was kludgy, and very expensive per-terminal as well.
The file system had a fragment size of either 4 or 8Kbytes (I forget
which). I thought that was a little wasteful of disk space.
It had some unusual conventions, like a standard directory in everyone's
home directory called "...", where .login, .cshrc, .profile, etc.
ad infinitem were located. This is a fine idea, but I'd rather AT&T
or Berkeley made such major inovations.
I think it had problems with super-recursive programs (stack overflow).
The executables, especially a minimum executable (compiled a.out of
hello_world.c) were ususually large.
It was quite fast, and had good floating point and integer benchmarks.
The most telling conclusion is that we stopped using it, and bought
a Vax 11/780 for that application (the one we had tried using UTS for).
They may have made dramatic improvements since then. I'd advice you
pay careful attention to the full duplex tty issue.
Mark LaCasse qantel!hplabs!sdcrdcf!randvax!lacasse
c/o The Rand Corporation cbosgd!ihnp4!sdcrdcf!randvax!lacasse
1700 Main Street lacasse@Rand-Unix
Santa Monica, CA 90406
213/393-0411 ext. 7420west@onion.cs.reading.ac.uk (Jerry West) (11/19/86)
In article <5383@brl-smoke.ARPA> lacasse@RAND-UNIX.arpa writes: >It had some unusual conventions, like a standard directory in everyone's >home directory called "...", where .login, .cshrc, .profile, etc. >ad infinitem were located. The comments above appear to refer to UTS 1.0 (I think, I forget their internal numbering scheme) which has been superceded by a Sys/V version of UTS. This is far less idiosyncratic than the earlier version. >They may have made dramatic improvements since then. I'd advice you >pay careful attention to the full duplex tty issue. The full duplex problem still exists, although they have made valiant efforts to provide support tools (editors, terminal support etc) for the sort of "intelligent" terminals IBM forces upon you. We don't have those sort of terminals (we didn't buy from IBM) and editing is damn frustrating. Jerry
gam@amdahl.UUCP (G A Moffett) (11/25/86)
In article <5383@brl-smoke.ARPA> lacasse@RAND-UNIX.arpa writes: > > The file system had a fragment size of either 4 or 8Kbytes (I forget > which). I thought that was a little wasteful of disk space. > It is 4K bytes. > It had some unusual conventions, like a standard directory in everyone's > home directory called "...", where .login, .cshrc, .profile, etc. > ad infinitem were located. This is a fine idea, but I'd rather AT&T > or Berkeley made such major inovations. Aha! You are describing our older product, UTS 2.x. UTS/580 today is quite conventional in its following of the System V standard. However, many programmers here liked the ... directory, too, and now use it for other purposes now. > The executables, especially a minimum executable (compiled a.out of > hello_world.c) were ususually large. If you are using printf(3) (as the conventional "hello, world" does), you are bringing in a lot of formatting and I/O code. I just wrote a "hello, world" using write(2), which turned out to be only 468 bytes (stripped). > It was quite fast, and had good floating point and integer benchmarks. Yes! Yes! Yes! > They may have made dramatic improvements since then. Fer shure! > I'd advice you > pay careful attention to the full duplex tty issue. I'm writing this article on my Macintosh, dialed in to UTS at 2400 baud (over a modem), using vi(1). You'd think you were on a Vax except it isn't so horribly slow -- ever. I think the reason UTS hasn't gotten more popular is simply that not enough people know about it! -- Gordon A. Moffett {whatever}!amdahl!gam ~ See the soldier with his gun ~ ~ Who must be dead to be admired ~ -- [ The opinions expressed, if any, do not represent Amdahl Corporation ]