Ultrix-11

Bill Gunshannon bill.gunshannon at hotmail.com
Wed Aug 18 06:38:25 CDT 2021


On 8/17/21 11:40 AM, Warner Losh via cctalk wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 17, 2021, 6:46 AM Dennis Grevenstein via cctech <
> cctech at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
>> Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>>
>>> With 3.1 available why would you want to run 2.0?  Someone mentioned
>>> a 4.0.  I don't remember there ever being anything after 3.1 (promised,
>>> but never saw it delivered)  Would be fun to look at.
> 
> 
> Yea. I've not seen anything survive on any of the abandonware sites.
> 
> But another way to ask: what is fixed between 2.0 and 3.1 that prompts Bill
> to ask me why I'd want 2.0 like it was nuts...

As near as I can tell, it wasn't so  much bug fixes (after all,
Ultrix-11 is just V7M rebadged) as it was additional hardware support.

> 
> But I suspect
>>> anything beginning with 4 is actually Ultrix-32 which I think went as
>>> far as 4.5.
>>
>> That seems likely, because AFAIR Ultrix-11 never got past 3.X.
>> In any way I would like to point out that Ultrix-11 and Ultrix-32 are
>> completely different: Ultrix-11 based on V7 (+addons) and Ultrix-32
>> based on 4.2BSD (+addons).
>>
> 
> Having looked at the sources to both and running diffs with tuhs, I can
> confirm this is the case. And ultrix-32 had different version numbers than
> ultrix-11. But the vax and mips versions shared the same sources as far as
> I can tell (though I don't know if it is common ancestor or operationally
> the same repo).

I have looked on the web and many sites (not DEC) are calling the 4.x
versions running on VAX and MIPS ULTRIX-11 instead of ULTRIX-32 which
is what it actually was.

> 
> Also, the addons to ultrix-11 include BSD networking. It has the feel of
> 2.9BSD with a more polished installer and sysgen (alien name in unix world,
> but common for DEC OSes).

And it works quite well within the confines of the limited PDP-11
hardware.  :-)

bill


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