first unix experiences / was Re: [cctalk] Re: An IRIX time capsule...

Mine was 3BSD running on a VAX 11/780 at Tektronix. Probably early 1980. Wasn't too much long after that, it was upgraded to 4BSD. I should say that the 11/780 ran production VMS during the day, but at 5PM, VMS was shut down, and BSD was loaded up for engineers and others to tinker with. It would stay online until 7AM, when VMS was returned to production use. Made for some long days...got to work at 8, and frequently wouldn't leave until 10PM. Those were the days where I had boundless energy (not so much any more). It wasn't too long before engineering really started yelling at the Computer Science Center about wanting full-time BSD, so another 11/780 was purchased for full-time Unix use. The new VAX came up with 4.1BSD, and wow, what a difference. It seemed to run much faster than the older BSD releases. The use of these machines was through a port-contender device...hooked up to a myriad of serial ports on the VAX, and going to a slew of video and printing terminals scattered around the campus. Sometimes it was hard to get a connection, as all of the ports on the VAX were full. The Unix machines because extremely popular very quickly. I mainly used a Tek 4023 (I think that was the model) dumb video terminal. I loved that terminal. It had a great keyboard, and just worked well. I wish I could find one today. I remember the first Sun machine that came into Tektronix. It was a Sun-2 machine, a 2/120 if I remember correctly. The thought of having one of these on my desk was mind-boggling. It didn't happen until quite some time later, when I ended up with a Sun 3/50 at my desk. My first personal Unix system was a Tektronix 6130, that I built from parts ordered from Tektronix engineering stock. The hard disk about broke the bank...a Micropolis 20MB 5 1/4" full-height drive. RAM was pretty expensive, too. It ran a derivative port of 4.2BSD called UTek. The TCP/IP Network stack was a little broken, didn't have the notion of subnet masks. I learned a lot about Unix internals, as I managed to get my hands on source, and could build my own kernels, drivers, and utilities. It took FOREVER to compile and link a new kernel. The machine used a National 32016 CPU. It had roughly 0.8x the performance of a VAX 750 in pure compute, but I/O was much slower. The disk was ST-506. I still love Unix, and always will. Rick Bensene