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Missing: how unbelievably bad Ultrix was. I admined a bunch of alpha systems and oh boy did two things stand out. The first was that ultrix was a just bad. Bad

Missing: how unbelievably bad Ultrix was. I admined a bunch of alpha systems and oh boy did two things stand out. The first was that ultrix was a just bad. Bad, bad, bad. Terrible performance, laggy, just everything bad about vendor Unix of the era. Windows NT on the same boxes flew by comparison. The other thing that stood out was how unbelievably bad first generation alpha text performance was. This is mentioned in that page when someone notes the lack of instructions to deal with 8/16 but quantities. But the lack of byte operations was deleterious: it meant things like grep were just dog slow next to literally anything else.

mnw21cam 3y ago
My research group in 2004-ish bought a couple of DEC Tru64 Unix boxes on the basis of their fast CPUs and the high availability features. We discovered fairly quickly that the OS was pretty awful compared to the Linux we had on all our other machines, and in particular the JVM was seriously crippled (which was unfortunate given most of the stuff we were developing was in Java).
systems_glitch 3y ago
It must be a later ULTRIX thing, I've ran it on VAXen and it's a pretty good BSD-enhanced *NIX there. Did you ever run the earlier (3.x, 4.x) ULTRIX releases?
icedchai 3y ago
As far as I know, Alphas ran Digital Unix (also known as Tru64 and OSF/1), not Ultrix. I remember using Ultrix on older DEC machines (DECstations) and it was quite bad.
- PeterWhittaker 3y ago
  Ah, yes, Digital UNIX, whose shells would conveniently clip command output to the terminal column width, even when invoked in a script. That one took a while to puzzle out, had to set COLUMMS to a ridiculously high number when running on DEC. (I was responsible for an install script that worked on pretty much all UNIXes of the time. The first few hundred or thousand lines were just figuring out which expcetional platform was in play and tweaking various parameters to get consistent results from sh, awk/gawk/nawk, ps, grep, etc. The good old days…)
  - icedchai 3y ago
    Digital Unix was definitely a strange beast! Not as strange as Ultrix though... Ultrix didn't even support shared libraries. Everything was static. In the mid 90's, I worked at an ISP where we had an Alpha / DEC Unix box for shell accounts. All the users hated it and demanded SunOS.

mnw21cam 3y ago

My research group in 2004-ish bought a couple of DEC Tru64 Unix boxes on the basis of their fast CPUs and the high availability features. We discovered fairly quickly that the OS was pretty awful compared to the Linux we had on all our other machines, and in particular the JVM was seriously crippled (which was unfortunate given most of the stuff we were developing was in Java).

systems_glitch 3y ago

It must be a later ULTRIX thing, I've ran it on VAXen and it's a pretty good BSD-enhanced *NIX there. Did you ever run the earlier (3.x, 4.x) ULTRIX releases?

icedchai 3y ago

As far as I know, Alphas ran Digital Unix (also known as Tru64 and OSF/1), not Ultrix. I remember using Ultrix on older DEC machines (DECstations) and it was quite bad.

PeterWhittaker 3y ago
Ah, yes, Digital UNIX, whose shells would conveniently clip command output to the terminal column width, even when invoked in a script. That one took a while to puzzle out, had to set COLUMMS to a ridiculously high number when running on DEC. (I was responsible for an install script that worked on pretty much all UNIXes of the time. The first few hundred or thousand lines were just figuring out which expcetional platform was in play and tweaking various parameters to get consistent results from sh, awk/gawk/nawk, ps, grep, etc. The good old days…)
- icedchai 3y ago
  Digital Unix was definitely a strange beast! Not as strange as Ultrix though... Ultrix didn't even support shared libraries. Everything was static. In the mid 90's, I worked at an ISP where we had an Alpha / DEC Unix box for shell accounts. All the users hated it and demanded SunOS.