5 ms·

I actually wrote a large chunk of the A/UX unix port (late 80s) - a decade before (mid 70s) I'd obtained an undergraduate degree in Comp Sci (in New Zealand) -

I actually wrote a large chunk of the A/UX unix port (late 80s) - a decade before (mid 70s) I'd obtained an undergraduate degree in Comp Sci (in New Zealand) - undergraduate Comp Sci was very much a thing at the time

mistrial9 5y ago
not at Berkeley ! but proper respect to you Taniwha, many paths
- Taniwha 5y ago
  Well I did the A/UX port IN Berkeley (the city, not the university). The thing is that as a discipline Comp Sci is a late comer, university Comp Sci departments came from lots of places, some grew out of Engineering depts, others from Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Commerce, others from the computing infrastructure groups withing universities - they ended up being called all sorts of things - early on places offered Comp Sci by a whole lot of names
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- cjsplat 5y ago
  Yes, Berkeley had undergrad CS degrees in the 80's (and late 70's). One in the College of Engineering and one in the College of Letters and Science. Also, an undergrad EECS in Engineering. The Bay Area school that didn't have an undergrad CS program was Stanfurd.
  - gumby 5y ago
    Back then MIT had one but Harvard did not. I felt sorry for my friends who opted to go there. H recently started an engineering school. Years ago they tried to buy MIT but were rebuffed.
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    evidence welcome - I do not recall that as the case
    - cjsplat 5y ago
      Surprisingly tricky to prove. It looks like Berkeley overhauled its student body statistics about 15 years ago, and data from before seems to have vanished. Is it argument from authority if I cite Karp? https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/bears/CS_Anniversary/karp-talk.html https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/bears/CS_Anniversary/karp-tal... The two undergraduate degree programs at Berkeley seem to date from 1968 or so. (Karp is fuzzy about his citations). It was certainly well established when I went there in the early 80's.
scruffyherder 5y ago
Have you ever played with this: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/aux-apple-unix-68k-version-07 https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/aux-apple-unix-68k-version-... I found it interesting that it mentions both ‘Milwaukee‘, and Cayman "brac" ... Here on the Jasmine 80. Seems like lots of weird codenames. It looks like UniSoft had done a lot of work on the code (you?) to make it super portable. Although everything not directly related to the Milwaukee was cut. It'd be interesting to see if the kernel could be built without MMU support.. I tried to remove PAGING but that didn't work. Oh yeah the kernel source is on that image and other than one damaged file, it not only builds, but works on a special Shoebill. cd /sys/psn rm *.o cd io mv screen-data.c screen_data.c cd .. make unix Pretty neat, none the less!
- Taniwha 5y ago
  (here's probably too much information) yup I wrote a lot of that, I did all the console stuff (font renderer, vt100, mouse, keyboard, fdb/adb, ui event queue etc). Missing is all the auto config support (ability to add 3rd party drivers to the kernel in the field, something that at the time you usually couldn't do without source), fixes for large screen support, all my appletalk code is missing too. However I can see the latish floppy bug fix (there was a hardware bug found in the FDB/ADB chip where if we accessed the floppy on only some systems the keyboard froze, turned out we were spinning reading the timer while reading the disk, doing it so fast the clock to the FDB chip sped up) and the older pre-fix code in "sony.c.~8A" - that sort of places the release in time. Given all that I'd guess that this is one of the early releases we gave to Apple that has somehow escaped - we used to fly to Oregon and copy disks to do releases to avoid California's sales taxes - UniSoft actually had an online modem based system where customers could log in and download the latest software - at the time CA tax law didn't explicitly cover electronic delivery of software, we were sued by the state and they lost setting a precedent It's been a long time but "psn" probably stands for "Pigs in Space" - our internal code name for the project (Apple's code name "Eagle" leaked, but ours never did). The "Cayman/brac" looks like what someone named their box, "Jasmine" was a type of hard drive, I've no idea about Milwaukee - I think Cayman used to be a company that made mac ethernet hardware, my guess would be that someone at Apple slipped them this pre-release, and then an update with some bug fixes, along with source (very naughty! AT&T would likely have sued us, ie UniSoft if they found out) The assembly font renderer uses the 68020 only bfins bit field insert instructions, it can under certain circumstances generate a 24-bit bus write, nubus doesn't support such a thing, we got half of the first big run of mac 2 boards, they came with a schematic and PAL equations, I got to send fixed PAL equations back to Ron at Apple to make it work. As far as "making it portable" a large part of that is just system 5 (SVR2 in this case) not so much us, though porting this code was our bread and butter - we supported a number of MMUs - 2 paging MMUs for 68020s, and a whole lot of swapping MMUs for 68010/68000s (plus 29k 88k etc) - it was never really designed to work without some form of MMU

mistrial9 5y ago

not at Berkeley ! but proper respect to you Taniwha, many paths

Taniwha 5y ago
Well I did the A/UX port IN Berkeley (the city, not the university). The thing is that as a discipline Comp Sci is a late comer, university Comp Sci departments came from lots of places, some grew out of Engineering depts, others from Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Commerce, others from the computing infrastructure groups withing universities - they ended up being called all sorts of things - early on places offered Comp Sci by a whole lot of names
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
cjsplat 5y ago
Yes, Berkeley had undergrad CS degrees in the 80's (and late 70's). One in the College of Engineering and one in the College of Letters and Science. Also, an undergrad EECS in Engineering. The Bay Area school that didn't have an undergrad CS program was Stanfurd.
- gumby 5y ago
  Back then MIT had one but Harvard did not. I felt sorry for my friends who opted to go there. H recently started an engineering school. Years ago they tried to buy MIT but were rebuffed.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  evidence welcome - I do not recall that as the case
  - cjsplat 5y ago
    Surprisingly tricky to prove. It looks like Berkeley overhauled its student body statistics about 15 years ago, and data from before seems to have vanished. Is it argument from authority if I cite Karp? https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/bears/CS_Anniversary/karp-talk.html https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/bears/CS_Anniversary/karp-tal... The two undergraduate degree programs at Berkeley seem to date from 1968 or so. (Karp is fuzzy about his citations). It was certainly well established when I went there in the early 80's.

scruffyherder 5y ago

Have you ever played with this: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/aux-apple-unix-68k-version-07 https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/aux-apple-unix-68k-version-... I found it interesting that it mentions both ‘Milwaukee‘, and Cayman "brac" ... Here on the Jasmine 80. Seems like lots of weird codenames. It looks like UniSoft had done a lot of work on the code (you?) to make it super portable. Although everything not directly related to the Milwaukee was cut. It'd be interesting to see if the kernel could be built without MMU support.. I tried to remove PAGING but that didn't work. Oh yeah the kernel source is on that image and other than one damaged file, it not only builds, but works on a special Shoebill. cd /sys/psn rm *.o cd io mv screen-data.c screen_data.c cd .. make unix Pretty neat, none the less!

Taniwha 5y ago
(here's probably too much information) yup I wrote a lot of that, I did all the console stuff (font renderer, vt100, mouse, keyboard, fdb/adb, ui event queue etc). Missing is all the auto config support (ability to add 3rd party drivers to the kernel in the field, something that at the time you usually couldn't do without source), fixes for large screen support, all my appletalk code is missing too. However I can see the latish floppy bug fix (there was a hardware bug found in the FDB/ADB chip where if we accessed the floppy on only some systems the keyboard froze, turned out we were spinning reading the timer while reading the disk, doing it so fast the clock to the FDB chip sped up) and the older pre-fix code in "sony.c.~8A" - that sort of places the release in time. Given all that I'd guess that this is one of the early releases we gave to Apple that has somehow escaped - we used to fly to Oregon and copy disks to do releases to avoid California's sales taxes - UniSoft actually had an online modem based system where customers could log in and download the latest software - at the time CA tax law didn't explicitly cover electronic delivery of software, we were sued by the state and they lost setting a precedent It's been a long time but "psn" probably stands for "Pigs in Space" - our internal code name for the project (Apple's code name "Eagle" leaked, but ours never did). The "Cayman/brac" looks like what someone named their box, "Jasmine" was a type of hard drive, I've no idea about Milwaukee - I think Cayman used to be a company that made mac ethernet hardware, my guess would be that someone at Apple slipped them this pre-release, and then an update with some bug fixes, along with source (very naughty! AT&T would likely have sued us, ie UniSoft if they found out) The assembly font renderer uses the 68020 only bfins bit field insert instructions, it can under certain circumstances generate a 24-bit bus write, nubus doesn't support such a thing, we got half of the first big run of mac 2 boards, they came with a schematic and PAL equations, I got to send fixed PAL equations back to Ron at Apple to make it work. As far as "making it portable" a large part of that is just system 5 (SVR2 in this case) not so much us, though porting this code was our bread and butter - we supported a number of MMUs - 2 paging MMUs for 68020s, and a whole lot of swapping MMUs for 68010/68000s (plus 29k 88k etc) - it was never really designed to work without some form of MMU