27 Dec
2008
27 Dec
'08
11:23 a.m.
On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 1:02 PM, Ken Seefried <ken at seefried.com> wrote:
FWIW...we ran 4.3 (locally hacked up, of course) on
our 11/750s at
GaTech in the late 80s and it was really very pleasant. A lot of
good research work got done on those boxes (as well as a ton of
nethack).
I ran 4.2BSD on an 8MB 11/750 (along with other OSes from time to
time) from the mid-1980s through the early 1990s. It was really nice
when you were the only one on the system. Fortunately, our user load
rarely exceeded 5 simultaneous logins, so the machine usually felt
like a single-user machine anyway. Our only (reasonable) complaint
was not enough disk space - the machine we had for Unix product
development (the CPU I still have in storage) had only a pair of RK07s
for disk. It was enough for the OS and our dev areas, but not enough
to really stretch out in. For that, our 11/730 with Ultrix 1.1 (4BSD
covered in DEC-hardware-specific scripts and other DECisms) with its
120MB R80 fit the bill better, even though the CPU was 75% as fast.
Eventually (1988?) we had a need to develop a "new" Unibus product
under UNIX - really just a repackaging of our existing products in a
new arrangement for a particular customer. For that, we bought a
spare RA81, being the cheapest moderate-sized disk at the time, and
had *plenty* of room for the two of us that used the machine.
Unfortunately, the development effort had to be balanced against the
"other" uses for the machine (as the main computer for everyone at the
company for MAIL, MASS-11, 2020 (spreadsheet), cutting customer tapes,
downloading test programs for the hardware guys, etc.), but as a UNIX
box, it screamed.
I can imagine that 4.3BSDmight not have grown so much that it would
crush an old Unibus machine, but I've never had the chance to try it
out.
-ethan