Brian Masinick
Getting the vapors 🙂 ( Yeah, I know, real computers have switches on the front panel…not for me–Hollerith cards were where it was at by my time )
You guys see that inxi? Soooo viafb in-kernel framebuffer video up, but not the openchrome xserver. Thinking that a reboot with that openchrome xserver installed will provide a different detection sequence upon boot and that another inxi will confirm/not.
Hey, I took an old PDP-11 at Digital, a few months after I joined the company (this was in early 1985) and booted one of those systems by programming the boot sequence, starting at Octal address 200 by selecting those panel switches and inserting the initial boot loader sequence.
From there, I copied, piece by piece, a new device driver that allowed newer PDP-11 models to work with the latest small and large form factor disk device drivers that a few engineers wrote. I installed them, but back then, until the new drivers were in place, we had slower, lower capacity removable drives, so I had to divide up the driver into pieces (I think I used split or some equivalent tool), put them in piece by piece, then enlarged or combined them to form the full device driver, then I ran some simple input/output tests and also played the game “Go Fish” to make sure that the Math libraries were properly in place (didn’t play for long; the intent was to verify the various major components of the system. I did, so then we distributed the results back to an AT&T customer, who wanted their UNIX System V on the PDP-11.
We had other projects that put UNIX System V on VAX systems too. When the DEC Alpha systems were created, we finally created Digital UNIX, which had BOTH UNIX System V and BSD Unix components, so we could sell these systems directly to AT&T and other UNIX customers. That turned out to be important because when the modern signalling network was put together, DEC (and later HP, which acquired DEC) wanted some billing system business from those telephony network switches to run on OUR UNIX system, which became Tru64 UNIX in the next release, the one that HP inherited.
That was right about the time that I left Digital, but one of my friends who stuck out that signalling/billing project, DID help HP get that business – must have been at least ten years or more in the works!
No sooner did all of that happen, then Linux overtook a lot of that stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised if that billing system stuff got ported over to Linux at some point in time; much lower licensing costs; actually zero for the software itself, but typically commercial Linux systems DO have a price because they carry guaranteed support and maintenance services with them; IBM and Red Hat Enterprise Linux lead the industry in that particular area!
--
Brian Masinick
Alternate "Search B":
This search page