Some Recollections
Clive
Reality/Pick. Since it's very quiet here perhaps I may be forgiven the
hubris of daring to think they may be vaguely of interest and I'll
post a link below :-
http://clive-hills.blogspot.com/2009/10/databases-and-i.html
Thank you,
Clive
Anne & Lynn Wheeler
re:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_6150_RT
from above:
One of the novel aspects of the RT design was the use of a
microkernel. The keyboard, mouse, display, disk drives and network were
all controlled by a microkernel, called Virtual Resource Manager (VRM),
which allowed multiple operating systems to be booted and run at the
same time. One could "hotkey" from one operating system to the next
using the Alt-Tab key combination. Each OS in turn would get possession
of the keyboard, mouse and display. Both AIX version 2 and the Pick
operating system were ported to this microkernel. Pick was unique in
being a unified operating system and database, and ran various
accounting applications. It was popular with retail merchants, and
accounted for about 4,000 units of sales.
... snip ...
The other way of looking at it was that the machine was originally
targeted as a displaywriter follow-on ... running the closed cp.r
operating system (and everything all written in pl.8).
When the displaywriter follow-on was killed, they looked around for
someother product/market to push the machine and decided on the unix
workstation market. they got the company that had done the AT&T unix
port to IBM/PC (for pc/ix) to do a port to pc/rt.
the line was that the in-house existing group could implement the VRM
(in pl.8) and the outside company could do the unix port to the abstract
virtual machine layer (VRM ... i.e. it wasn't a "native" virtual
machine) in less time than if the outside company did the port to the
bare metal (doing the VRM did have the side-effect of giving the
in-house PL.8 programmers something to do).
the counter-example was that west coast group did port of BSD unix to
the bare PC/RT metal ... and that time/effort was much less either the
VRM or AIXV2 efforts (BSD Unix port to bare metal was less time/effort
than VRM effort *AND* BSD UNIX port to bare metal was less effort than
AT&T unix port to VRM abstract virtual machine interface).
There was also ongoing issues like new devices required both VRM drivers
(in PL.8) as well as AIX drivers (in C).
misc. past posts about 801, iliad, romp, rios, power, power/pc, etc
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801
for little drift ... recent post (in a.f.c.)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#11
mentiong Sowa and semantic network DBMS
http://www.jfsowa.com
Which was ported to aix.
--
40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970
Mensanator
> Clive <clive.hi...@gmail.com> writes:
> > I've just written up some recollections about my past experiences with
> > Reality/Pick. Since it's very quiet here perhaps I may be forgiven the
> > hubris of daring to think they may be vaguely of interest and I'll
> > post a link below :-
>
> >http://clive-hills.blogspot.com/2009/10/databases-and-i.html
>
> > Thank you,
> > Clive
>
> re:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_6150_RT
>
> from above:
>
> One of the novel aspects of the RT design was the use of a
> microkernel. The keyboard, mouse, display, disk drives and network were
> all controlled by a microkernel, called Virtual Resource Manager (VRM),
> which allowed multiple operating systems to be booted and run at the
> same time. One could "hotkey" from one operating system to the next
> using the Alt-Tab key combination. Each OS in turn would get possession
> of the keyboard, mouse and display. Both AIX version 2 and the Pick
> operating system were ported to this microkernel. Pick was unique in
> being a unified operating system and database, and ran various
> accounting applications. It was popular with retail merchants, and
> accounted for about 4,000 units of sales.
Ah, good 'ol Pick (my company used Pick for their accounting system).
As the company was going under, we tried to sell a Pick system to
run our time clock/inventory control system.
Ended up selling nearly one system.
sidd
And thank you also.