| Revision as of 02:38, 29 April 2006 editRenamedUser2 (talk | contribs)6,002 edits →External links: - added link from osdata← Previous edit | Revision as of 14:49, 12 May 2006 edit undoKonob6 (talk | contribs)5 editsNo edit summaryNext edit → | ||
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
| Deleted | |||
| {{Infobox_OS | | |||
| name = Ultrix | | |||
| logo = | | |||
| screenshot = | | |||
| caption = | | |||
| developer = ] | | |||
| family = ] ] | | |||
| source_model = | | |||
| latest_release_version = 4.5 | | |||
| latest_release_date = 1995 | | |||
| working_state = Historic | | |||
| kernel_type = monolithic| | |||
| license = | | |||
| website = | | |||
| }} | |||
| '''Ultrix''' (officially all-caps '''ULTRIX''') was the brand name of ]'s (DEC) native ] systems. While ''ultrix'' is the ] word for avenger, the name was chosen solely for its sound. | |||
| '''''~Ron~''''' | |||
| ==History== | |||
| The initial development of Unix occurred on DEC equipment, notably DEC ] and ] (Programmable Data Processor) systems. Later DEC computers, such as their ] systems were also popular platforms to run Unix on; the first port to VAX, ], was finished in ] (the VAX was only released in ] ]). However DEC supplied their own proprietary ] operating system for a long time before they acknowledged Unix. | |||
| Absolutely key to bringing Unix to inside the company, DEC's Unix Engineering Group (UEG) was started by Bill Munson with Jerry Brenner and Fred Canter, both from DEC's premier Customer Service Engineering group, Bill Shannon (from Case Western University), and Armando Stettner (from Bell Labs). Other later members of UEG included Joel Magid, Bill Doll, and Jim Barclay recruited from DEC's various marketing and product management groups. | |||
| The UEG team, under Canter's direction, released '''V7M''', a modified version of ] (q.v.). | |||
| ===BSD=== | |||
| Shannon and Stettner worked on low-level ] and device driver support initially on UNIX/32V but quickly moved to concentrate on working with the ]'s ]. Berkeley's ] came to New Hampshire to work with Shannon and Stettner to wrap up a new BSD release, incorporating the UEG CPU support and drivers, and to do some last minute development and testing on other configurations available at DEC's facilities. As an aside, the three brought up a final test version on the main VAX used by the VMS development group. No comments were heard from the VMS developers whose terminals greeted them the next morning with a Unix login prompt... UEG's machine was the first to run the new Unix, labeled 4.5BSD as was the tape Bill Joy took with him. The thinking was that 5BSD would be the next version - university lawyers thought it would be better to call it 4.1BSD. After the completion of 4.1BSD, Bill Joy left Berkeley to work at ]. Bill Shannon later moved from New Hampshire to join him. | |||
| As an aside, DEC UEG's main VAX, named decvax, was also one of the central nodes in the ] and ] network. It was the first system to link, in real time for email and Usenet news article, the east and west coasts of the US, ] (duke) and UC Berkeley (ucbvax). Later, after some compression capability was added to netnews, decvax was linked with Europe (], Amsterdam) and then Australia (]), making calls at least twice per day each. | |||
| Armando Stettner suggested to Bill Doll during a hallway conversation that it was time for DEC to make a native VAX Unix product available to its customers. A proposal was made to Bill Munson who later presented the idea to ]. It was said that Olsen grabbed a ], slapped it on someone's chest and said let's do it. Thus began Ultrix. | |||
| ===First release of Ultrix=== | |||
| The first Ultrix OS, Ultrix-32, was based on 4.2BSD with some features from ], and was released in ]. Its purpose was to provide a DEC-supported native Unix for VAX. It also incorporated several modifications and scripts from Usenet/UUCP experience gained while running decvax. Later, Ultrix-32 incorporated support for ] and other proprietary DEC protocols such as ]. It did not support ]. Shortly thereafter, DEC also offered a product based upon its V7M release. Given ]/AT&T Unix licensing, DEC (and others) were restricted to selling binary-only licenses. A significant part of the engineering work was in making the systems relatively flexible and configurable despite their binary-only nature. | |||
| Later on, DEC provided native Unix operating systems on three platforms: ] minicomputers (where it was one of many available operating systems), ] based computers (where it was one of two primary OS choices), and DEC's first line of ] systems, the ] workstations and ] servers (where it was the only OS choice offered). Note that the DECstation systems used ] processors, not the much later ]. | |||
| The original versions were known as ''Ultrix-11'' and ''Ultrix-32'', but as the PDP-11 faded from view it became known simply as ''Ultrix'', or to its detractors as ''Buglix'' or ''Scrofulix''. When the MIPS versions of Ultrix was released, the VAX and MIPS versions were referred to as VAX/ULTRIX and RISC/ULTRIX respectively. Much engineering emphasis was placed on supportability and reliable operations including continued work on CPU and device driver support (which was, for the most part, also sent to UC Berkeley), hardware failure support and recovery with enhancement to error message text, documentation, and general work at both the kernel and systems program levels. Later Ultrix-32 incorporated some features from 4.3BSD and included ] in addition to the standard ], and both the ] and DEC's ] protocols. | |||
| Notably, implemented in Ultrix were the ] (IPC) facilities found in System V (], ], ], and ]). While the converged Unix from the ] (that spawned the ] or OSF), released late ], put BSD features into System V, DEC took the best from System V and added it to a BSD base. | |||
| Originally, on the VAX workstations, Ultrix-32 had a ] called UWS, Ultrix Workstation Software, which was based on a version of the ]. Later, the widespread version 11 of the ] (X11) was added, using a look and feel called ] that was devised in order to mimic the look and feel of the UWS system. Eventually DECwindows also provided the ] look and feel. | |||
| Ultrix ran on ] systems from both the VAX and DECsystem families. The ] supported ] while not being fully ]. As such, there was liberal use of locking and some tasks could only be done by a particular CPUs (e.g. the processing of ]s). This was not uncommon in other SMP implementations of that time (e.g. ]). Sadly, Ultrix was slow to support many then new or emerging Unix system capabilities found on competing Unix systems (e.g. it never supported shared libraries or ] executables; delay in implementing bind, 4.3BSD system calls and libraries especially the math libraries; etc.) and suffered from some problems, most notably file system integrity issues (having never picked up the 4.3BSD filesystem and fixes). | |||
| ===Last release=== | |||
| As part of its commitment to the OSF, DEC replaced its Ultrix-32 as its Unix offering with ], which was released shortly before the Alpha-based computers that supplanted the VAX and MIPS-based machines. OSF/1 had a ]-based kernel with many of the features missing from Ultrix. Again, the UEG (by now the Ultrix Engineering Group) worked at making the new OSF/1-based Digital Unix run well on DEC hardware, with the reliability and maintainability that people came to expect from DEC operating systems. | |||
| The last major release of Ultrix was version 4.5 in ], which supported DECstations and VAXen. There were some subsequent Y2K patches. | |||
| ==See also== | |||
| *] | |||
| ==External links== | |||
| * | |||
| * (last updated April 10, 2002) | |||
| ] | |||
| ] | |||
| ] | |||
| ] | |||
| ] | |||
| ] | |||
Revision as of 14:49, 12 May 2006
Deleted
~Ron~