25 Apr
2015
25 Apr
'15
1:09 a.m.
It's actually growing on me, I just found the UNSUPPORTED directory on the install CD
that I had to hack with ed to get going in the first place - GNU EMACS, a bunch of games,
APL and of course a CP/M 8" disk manipulator!
Now if somebody could just tell me where to get DECNET for 4.5 this'll start becoming
one of my favourite OSes :)
Oh and is there like a BSD ports type tree for this? Or am I thinking wrong decade?
sampsa
On 24 Apr 2015, at 23:17, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
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