[HECnet] JBEIL IS UP! (was Re: ULTRIX DECNET LMF?)

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2015-04-25 00:10, Clem Cole wrote:
>
> On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 6:02 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se
> <mailto:bqt at softjar.se>> wrote:
>
>     ​U​
>     ltrix was an odd child even when it was "current". Just check any
>     contemporary software for all the comments about the special things
>     needed for it to compile and work on Ultrix.
>
> ​Fair enough - as I said, it was a time where everyone was trying to
> protect their own turf.  The Sun/AT&T deal sort of cemented that, which
> is why OSF/1 was so important.

I actually should temper my statement a little. Ultrix certainly wasn't 
all bad. It was in many ways pretty well done. It just was pretty 
different from most other things, making it much harder to port software 
to. While it was (more or less) BSD 4.3, a bunch of libraries and 
functions were for some reason kept at the BSD 4.2 level. Typical of 
this was syslog, for instance.

Compilers and tools as such were fine. Support for the hardware was 
good, and it had some features and functionality that you wish had 
existed on other Unix systems.

But the fact that so many "standard" things (I know, standard and Unix 
weren't exactly synonyms, or even well defined back then) in Ultrix were 
different than most other systems and what most other software expected 
meant that getting any software running on Ultrix was usually a pain. So 
you started with replacing whole chunks of libraries and subsystems to 
something a bit more "modern" and compatible with other systems, just to 
make your life easier.

I've run both Ultrix 4.4 and Ultrix 4.5 for several years. In fact, 
Updates VAX 8650 have Ultrix on one disk. Just need to type "boot" with 
the right arguments, and the machine is up and running.

No DECnet, though. Sorry. :-(

	Johnny