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FreeBee: AT&T Unix PC emulator
- userbinator 2y agoFor those who didn't know what this was and (wrongly) thought it was some sort of IBM-compatible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_UNIX_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_UNIX_PC
- bobmcnamara 2y agoBut it sorta was! I had a 3B1. You could run DOS inside a window in the main environment.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoLike, MS-DOS? How? It doesn't seem to have had an x86 CPU to run it on. (I'm assuming this predates emulation like we might use today for that kind of thing.) Edit: Oh, kept reading the wikipedia article and found the mention of an 8086 expansion card. That's cool:)
- nopakos 2y agoWe had PC emulators on the 68000 based Atari ST in the 80s. No extra hardware needed, but very slow! And I'm sure that emulators was a thing from the very first computers.
- pjmlp 2y agoAmigas as well, that is how some of my friends would do their assignments on high school.
- wkat4242 2y agoYeah and one of the reasons was that every byte had to be reversed due to the endianness. So it was never going to be anything but slow. There were pc addon boards for this reason for both Amiga and Atari but they were expensive as they were basically a whole pc on a board.
- rob74 2y agoI had one of these in my Amiga 500: https://www.edsa.uk/blog/the-kcs-power-pc-board https://www.edsa.uk/blog/the-kcs-power-pc-board (this was before the PowerPC CPUs appeared on the market, so the name wasn't as confusing as it sounds today). In addition to being a PC board, it also doubled as a memory expansion and RTC when you were using the host Amiga system.
- bobmcnamara 2y agoMine had an 8086 too!
- alxlaz 2y agoSome systems also had expansion cards with an x86 processor on them. A more recent example would be Sun's SunPC and SunPCI cards -- you plugged these in a SBus or PCI slot, and ran x86 code on a real x86 processor. IIRC that's actually what the AT&T Unix PC did, too, but I'm not sure (I never owned one).
- sanxiyn 2y agoSee "DOS-73 Technical Reference" on the linked page for details. Yes, DOS-73 expansion cards had 8086 CPUs.
- mschaef 2y agoSun also briefly made a 386 based workstation. It didn't do well, but it could run DOS via V86 in a window on an otherwise Sun desktop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun386i https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun386i
- jasomill 2y agoThe ST was at least a cost-effective way to emulate a PC very slowly. Not so much for SoftPC for VMS, which cost as much as an entry-level ST for the software alone: http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/catalog/Digital_US_Software_Price_List_19950403.pdf#page=161 http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/catalog/Digital_U... But hey, MS-DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.1 would have at least both fit comfortably on a single TK50 cartridge or 9-track open-reel tape, so at least you weren't stuck in front of the console swapping floppies waiting for the products to install.
- philpem 2y agoAh, you had a DOS-73 expansion card?
- bobmcnamara 2y agoThat must've been it! My friend and I bought them used at a yard sale at the end of the airport from a couple who had worked at TWA - they were former TWQ machines. I don't think we ever opened them.
- philpem 2y agoNice setup! I have a 7300 and a 3B1 (7300 is single half-height hard drives, 3B1 is two HH or one full-height). One has a Combo Card (RAM and serial) and a Floppy Tape card, I can't remember what the other has, but cards have been pretty thin on the ground. A DOS-73 or network card would be extremely nice to have. The emulator actually started life because I couldn't find a machine for sale at a price I could afford, but the manuals were on Bitsavers. Someone later sold me the 7300 and 3B1.
- nxobject 2y agoIt's a perfectly good personal computer, though!
- rob74 2y agoYeah, back in the 80s, "PC" wasn't synonymous with "IBM PC/clone" yet. That only happened by the mid/end 90s, when all "personal computer" competitors (except for the Mac) had been forced out of the market...
- vram22 2y agoYou could connect a phone to it. I think I saw an old magazine article (maybe BYTE) about it once, which said that, and had a photo of it, with the phone. The Wikipedia article article says it had 3 phone jacks.
- rob74 2y agoI originally thought this was an emulator to run (original) AT&T Unix applications on a PC. Then I googled it and found the article you linked. The photo in the article doesn't really give you a good idea of how the system looked like when in use, here's a better one: https://oldcomputers.net/pics/att-unix-pc-left.jpg https://oldcomputers.net/pics/att-unix-pc-left.jpg . If the keyboard is attached to the main case, the design makes it look so flush that you can overlook the fact that it's detachable.
- philpem 2y ago> thought this was an emulator to run (original) AT&T Unix applications on a PC Technically it is, if you mean System V for MC68k :)
- bimguy 2y agoBeing Australian, I don't know much about the company other then it's a popular telecom provider in North America so it's interesting to see that they had their hands in workstations at some point.
- razakel 2y agoAT&T invented, among other things, transistors, lasers, photovoltaic cells, CCDs, information theory, radio astronomy, C, and Unix.
- vram22 2y agoC++ too, right? Unless Bell Labs was spun out of AT&T before that. Stroustrup started C++ at Bell Labs as C with Classes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B
- rbanffy 2y agoWe are only mentioned the good things they did. ;-)
- goosedragons 2y agoS and thus R came out of there too.
- shrubble 2y agoAT&T was the renamed Bell Telephone, responsible for the invention of huge swaths of technology. You can look at old PDFs of the Bell System Technical Journal, published 1922 to 1983. Bell was also the birthplace of Unix.
- andsoitis 2y agoAnd then some: ”Researchers from there are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and others. Ten Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs
- LeoPanthera 2y agoThe 3B1 was one of the few uses of the 68010, which was basically a 68000 with a few bug fixes and, importantly, support for virtual memory. Combined with a separate MMU, this allowed you to run Unix.
- philpem 2y agoThe VM support was the killer feature. The 3B1 has a hardware (discrete logic!) MMU, a custom designed thing completely unlike the Motorola 68451. It's an odd beast and took a lot of work (by several people, not just myself; check the git commit logs and CREDITS) to get it right.
- anthk 2y agoDidn't SDF use this machine?
- larsbrinkhoff 2y agoNo a 3B2, which is different.
- philpem 2y agoAnd probably the only real at-scale deployment of the Western Electric 32000 (Bellmac 32) processor. Sadly that chip wasn't very popular. As LeoPanthera said above, Bell's exchange for the ability to make PCs was a bit of a bad swap in retrospect. It's pretty easy to see they were going for some kind of convergence of computing and telecoms (the 3B1 has an internal 1200 Baud modem) but they didn't do well on that bet.
- smcameron 2y agoAs an intern during college I remember installing the OS on a 3B1 at one of my first summer jobs. So many floppy diskettes. Don't remember much more about it other than it seemed pretty primitive compared to the Sun workstations that were prevalent around the office.
- jasoneckert 2y agoAnother neat aspect of this machine was the hype around it at the time. AT&T took out ads in most magazines and pundits thought it would overtake the IBM PC because it ran UNIX and had some great software, including the first version of Microsoft Word (which was originally written for UNIX, specifically Microsoft's Xenix).
- philpem 2y agoIt's really a shame how little of that software has survived. I think I have a complete Foundation Set disk set, some others I wrote from ImageDisk images, and that's about it. UNIX software in general seems pretty thin on the ground. The OSes are out there (even rarities like Interactive Unix 4.1 - though not the later patches e.g. FDISK 2GB) but software? Hen's teeth. ACCELL Unify would be interesting to find, it's the software General Instrument used to write the front-end for their cable TV headends.
- mananaysiempre 2y ago> ACCELL Unify would be interesting to find Both WinWorld[1] and Vetusware[2] have (what look like identical copies of) it for the 3B2. [1] https://winworldpc.com/product/unify/31 https://winworldpc.com/product/unify/31 [2] https://vetusware.com/download/Unify/?id=11459 https://vetusware.com/download/Unify/?id=11459
- philpem 2y agoAh, that's neat - it'd be nice to have it for SCO or Interactive Unix on x86. Especially Interactive, as that's the one I have to try and fix (Y2K20 issues).
- rbc 2y agoI owned a 3B1 back in the early 90's. It hosted my personal email delivered by UUCP. Seeing FreeBee is a blast from the past to be sure.
- dmd 2y ago(Note: Yes, I know a 3B2 is not related at all to a 3B1! But I figure if you're interested in one, you're probably interested in the other.) As late as 2002, at AT&T Easylink Services we were still using 3B2s to process email and email-to-fax on a private X.25 network; the beginnings of a 3B2 emulation-on-Sun-hardware project was in the works; I don't know if it ever went anywhere. Some interesting documentation I wrote here: https://3e.org/private/gms/ https://3e.org/private/gms/
- icedchai 2y agoBack in the early 90's, I had a friend with one of these. It was a neat machine. I remember an unusual windowing system on it ("MGR", I think?) We were starting to get into PC unix clones - first Coherent, then Linux (SLS distro?) - around the same time.
- philpem 2y agoMGR was a later one - it could run (slowly) with an unmodified machine but really needed a VIDPAL to be used best. VIDPAL was a replacement PAL which enabled user-mode access to the framebuffer.