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I used to work under a former Cray engineer who wrote the linker for UNICOS (Cray Unix). He was instructed by the architects to write a single-pass linker for $
by beat 13y ago
I used to work under a former Cray engineer who wrote the linker for UNICOS (Cray Unix). He was instructed by the architects to write a single-pass linker for $some_theoretical_reason, but he did what he felt was right and wrote a double-pass linker instead. Customers later praised the stability and usefulness of the UNICOS linker relative to its competitors at the time, so he felt validated.
From him, I learned the phrase "It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission". Still my favorite manager ever, and one of the reasons I believe mentoring is so important in our industry.
(I actually worked with a lot of former Cray engineers in the late 1990s. Brilliant, all of them. I learned a lot.)
- guelo 13y agowas there more than one OS or is this UNICOS what they're trying to get running?
- ams6110 13y agoNo the Cray OS would have preceded UNICOS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_Operating_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_Operating_System Also some customers developed their own operating systems. Note that systems like this also required a separate management computer to boot the mainframe and load the OS.
- beat 13y agoThere was more than one OS. Supercomputer manufacturers (not just Cray) were basically hardware companies, and operating systems were an afterthought. Software was written on other systems and loaded in from the outside. UNICOS was a regular System V Unix port, to give users the sort of rich experience of a modern operating system.