Amdahl UTS vs. Unix/V and Berke

[roma at uiucuxc.CSO.UIUC.EDU]

> /* Written  4:13 pm  Nov 13, 1986 by lacasse at RAND-UNIX.arpa */
> /* ---------- "Re: Amdahl UTS vs. Unix/V and Berke" ---------- */
> 
> We evaluated UTS for quite a while here, back in 1982 or so.  This is my
> personal opinion, and not that of Rand.

You were evaluating a VASTLY different version of UTS than what is now
available.

> The biggest problem we had is that our IBM hardware didn't have full
> duplex tty lines.  We wanted to use screen-oriented software (both that
> did, and did not use the curses library).  We tried leasing a fancier
> full-duplex terminal controller, but it was very expensive.  One fellow
> here hooked up two tty lines to one terminal, and ran the Rand Editor on
> it that way.  This was kludgy, and very expensive per-terminal as well.

Though we don't currently use it, there is full-duplex software available from
Amdahl that will give you full-duplex ASCII terminals with 'vi' and 'curses'.
It uses an Amdahl 4705 or IBM 3705 box to do this.  I don't know how expensive
this is per terminal, but the box doesn't have to be dedicated to UTS.  (In
other words, you can use it to provide lines in to VM/CMS as well as UTS.)

> The file system had a fragment size of either 4 or 8Kbytes (I forget
> which).  I thought that was a little wasteful of disk space.

The file systems were blocked at 4K; I guess this is a bit wasteful, but smaller
block sizes are inefficient on fast DASD such as the IBM 3380 -- in fact, I
think 4K is considered the optimal blocking for these disks.  Based on some
things I've read in the code, I'd wouldn't be surprised if UTS eventually allows
file systems to be blocked at either 1K, 2K, or 4K.  That way, sites could
optimize as per their own needs.

> It had some unusual conventions, like a standard directory in everyone's
> home directory called "...", where .login, .cshrc, .profile, etc.
> ad infinitem were located.

These unusual conventions are peculiar to the obsolete version of UTS you
tried; the current version is a System V standard UNIX and thus behaves as
one would expect.
  
> They may have made dramatic improvements since then.

Yes, they indeed have.  In fact, the current UTS hardly bears any resemblance
to the older version you evaluated.

Jon Roma
Computing Services Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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