20 Aug
2021
20 Aug
'21
12:46 p.m.
On Fri, Aug 20, 2021 at 1:14 PM Bill Gunshannon via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Yes. I was around in this era and learning to do a from-scratch
install was an ordeal. DEC did package things up with a set of
questions (vs knowing which lines of which files had to be
hand-edited) and incorporated all the supported disks and tapes and
serial muxes, etc. All DEC, of course, so if you had 3rd-party
hardware you were out in the wilderness (we provide such a 3rd-party
intelligent serial device into this environment so I know how hard it
could be). If you had a standard DEC box, it was fairly push-button.
That was part of their magic. It mostly worked.
http://ftp.fibranet.cat/UnixArchive/Distributions/DEC/Fred-Ultrix3/setup-3.…
I've installed older versions of UNIX where you had to explicitly set
up disks and partitions (where you _could_ resize partitions). Prior
to restoring the contents from tape. That didn't appear to be as easy
with this installer script.
I think the intent of the Ultrix-11 3,x install is to make it as
simple as possible to get a system up and running on the hardware
available in the day and then with time and experience one could
create more advanced systems. I hope, eventually, to make a system
with four RA81 disks with root and usr occupying entire RA81's and
two more for User files.
Wow! That's way bigger than our biggest machine at work in 1993. We
had that 11/750 (that I upgraded to 8MB including adding the extra
memory address line on the backplane) and it pinged back and forth
between VMS 4.5 most of the time and Ultrix-32 3.something as needed
for customers. It had a dedicated Fuji 160MB drive that mapped as two
RM03s and a Fuji Eagle that used the RM05 device entry but patched for
full capacity (400MB) plus that $26,000 RA81 - Total of just under 1GB
on 3 spindles and two controllers (Unibus and CMI bus). When this box
was running UNIX, I was the only user so I usually did that off-hours
so everyone else could use VMS for workday tasks.
sadly, using an RA81 still only gives you:
/dev/ra01 9598 2849 6749 30% /usr
Tiny!
Those were the days. Sadly, most people in the
business today know
nothing about them.
The forgetting of this environment is why recently there's a push to
collapse all UNIX system binaries into one place because "kids today"
have never been on a system where the operating system is spread
across multiple spindles for space/cost/performance reasons. Everyone
is used to massive drives where the OS takes up 1% or less of the
entire disk and you only really worry about space for logfiles or
/var/tmp so that userland programs that leave big messes don't crush
the boot volume with endless spewage.
With variable-zone disks (1990s tech) people stopped bothering to try
to tweak performance on cylinder boundaries because you used to have
14 heads and track-to-track switching was 10X faster than stepping.
Some parts of the old UNIX dance I do not miss. ;-)
-ethan