mo@seismo.UUCP (Mike O'Dell) (10/09/83)
Over a year ago, the AT&T people at one of the Usenix meetings announced the availability of Unix/TSS which runs as the native operating system on 370-based machines. The TSS is in the name because, I am told, that since the 370 is such a beast for which to write I/O drivers and memory management code, and that the very bottom layer of TSS provides a 16-meg address space process plus 4096-byte block I/O drivers which look very much like ones in Unix, they did the sensible thing and started from this bottom layer. If memory serves me, the source license was $100K. Before you all faint, this amount is about what many large IBM sites pay per year, every year, for program product rentals. And since they were talking about supporting *hundreds* of users, it ain't too shabby. -Mike
nishri@utcsstat.UUCP (Alex Nishri) (10/13/83)
An AT&T representative at SHARE (the IBM large mainframe user's group) a year ago gave a talk about UNIX for IBM/370 architecture computers. He said that AT&T hired IBM to hack up TSS to be used as the 'virtual computer' bottom layer to UNIX. This simplified porting of UNIX. (Most IBMers had assumed assumed that TSS, a very old system from the distant past, had long since been forgotten.) AT&T also got IBM to write new software for a standard IBM front end computer. IBM front end computers generally only support terminals in half-duplex, but this new code allowed full-duplex. The person giving the presentation said that once somebody at Bell Labs was moved to the IBM hardware they refused to go back to anything else. Apparently the most impressive thing about IBM hardware was the over 98% reliability. Another feature was the faster compile time on the bigger machines. The presenter said that the Unix for 370 machines was available (for a fee) from AT&T, but that the reels of tape you got would be useless because IBM refuses to release their hacked up TSS and front end software that goes along with this software (outside of Bell itself). (Many people hissed but that has not helped change IBM's mind ... but then many people could not understand why AT&T used TSS and not VM and that did not help either.) Amdahl's Unix for 370 machines (known as UTS) also uses a bottom layer to simplify porting, but it uses VM/370 (or VM/SP) a very common and supported operating system. UTS will apparently be able to run native very soon (if it doesn't already.) UTS also uses existing front end computer software and thus is half-duplex. (There are some ways to give the illusion of full-duplex but they are not very satisfying.) Anyone requiring specific references, names, etc can send me mail. I still have the notes that I took. What I would be curious to know -- is there any AT&T Unix running on an IBM/370XA machine yet? Alex Nishri University of Toronto ... utcsstat!nishri