Ancient UNIX; was Re: [Gllug] loadavg

[Ian Northeast]

Warning: Only of interest to those with a penchant for history. Or 
cursed with historical systems. Me, I think history is important. It 
tells you how not to fsck it up next time. In theory anyway, we still 
went to war in Iraq a couple of years ago. I don't recall doing anything 
so bad with UNIX, not even in 1990.

Joel Bernstein wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 07:55:08AM +0000, Nix wrote:
> 
>>On Mon, 24 Jan 2005, Ian Northeast stated:
>>
>>>I also have an even weirder one, a thing called UTS, an early UNIX for
>>>the IBM mainframe originally produced by Amdahl. However:
>>
>>Oh wow. I didn't think there were any of those left :)

There's still a company in business supporting it, UTS Global. They are 
US based and their main business is in the US (I believe AT&T still use 
UTS) but they manage a UK branch (which serves all of Europe and 
probably a bit more). I thought ours was the last in the UK, I don't 
think the unmentionable one in the unmentionable place not a million 
miles from Whitehall which had a missile dropped near it (but not quite 
near enough) a few years back is still there and Reading University 
definitely got rid of theirs. But with a company making a living out of 
supporting it, there must still be a few around. We're using V2, there 
was a V4 (no V3) but the transition from V2 to V4 was too painful - you 
have to recompile all application programs due to the incompatibility in 
the size of the "fundamental types" - UIDs etc.

> Doesn't UTS run on the S/360 mainframe series, under VM?

S/370 actually, and with V2 only on the XA architecture (the one with > 
16MB address spaces, which arrived in the mid '80s). Originally only 
under VM because UTS couldn't handle the hardware exceptions, then 
natively on Amdahl hardware and now natively on IBM S/390 or z Series 
hardware.

> I'd presume that given the relative processing power available, this
> must be a serious legacy system? Or do you just keep it online as
> airconditioner ballast? ;)

A modern mainframe is actually reasonably powerful, and you can put 
realistic amounts of memory in it, and it isn't too big. You can't live 
in one any more:) IBM still consider them to be viable, although I 
suspect the customer base is on the small side. And they do run Linux. But..

Egregiously legacy indeed. So much so that most of the powers that be 
have forgotten it exists, hence the lack of budget to do anything about 
it. All Oracle client apps using Forms 3 (the Curses/3270 based one), 
the databases being elsewhere. It's using less resources than my SuSE 
desktop, as the latter is running KDE. But it's sharing physical 
hardware with a hard working zOS (once known as MVS, then OS/390) 
system. So there's no real cost, not until the zOS system gets turned 
off. Then the proverbial hits the fan - "it costs *how much* to run this 
tiny app for three people in Rotterdam?". Plus it relies on zOS to run 
the VTAM network which allows the users to access it. It does do IP 
(now) but the apps are all built around VTAM and 3270s. The developers 
used to use Curses to develop and then port to 3270, but I don't think 
the process is repeatable, all the original forms have undoubtedly been 
lost and all the original developers have left. A zOS license is not cheap.

Anyone else here ever seen UNIX function with no IP stack? I did, last 
year. The OSAs (Mainframe-ese for NICs, they're similar except for 
costing 2 orders of magnitude more) had been grabbed by a zOS partition 
  (they have to be configured with zOS, UTS can't do it) and the stack 
wouldn't initialise. But SNA still worked, over the virtual CTCA, we 
could get into it.

> IIRC UTS is an early System V-based system. SVR3 maybe?

Correct, SVR3, you get the bonus prize for an incredible memory:)

>>And it Just Keeps Running...

> Well yes. That was when they built Proper Computers ;)

But it's running on a fairly new (c. 2 yrs) z800. It's physically 
smaller than our largest p Series boxes (RS/6000s), which are p690s. Of 
similar vintage. And the hardware cost about the same per box (the new 
p5 UNIX servers are much cheaper). Our newest, greatest, allest 
singingest and allest dancingest UNIX app requires three of these beasts 
for its DB servers.

Regards, Ian

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