Re: Unix Haters

[eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)]

   At 05:21 AM 3/26/96 GMT, Wallace E. Owen wrote:

   > What was the first OS to permit mounting another computer's disks
   > over the net? Unix, with RPC/XDR/NFS.  Yes, it's now available
   > for some other OS's but none integrate it so well.

   If we fail to learn from history... ;-)

   I don't really know how to answer this, since there are some
ambiguities in the question.  If net refers to the Internet, the
answer has to be either Multics, DEC-10's, or Honeywell 316's.  If
not, we can go a bit further back.  Most fault-tolerant computer
systems support, and have always supported cross-mounting of disks.
Tandem had this feature when the ARPAnet consisted of a few computers,
but IBM set many System 360s up this way when Tandem was still at the
IPO stage. (Disk drives were connected to two disk controllers, one on
each machine.)  NASA had four IBM 7094s which I think had cross
mounted disks, as did a pair of 7094s at Project MAC.  (And many 7094
computers used IBM 1401s as I/O controllers/devices but I digress.)
If you allow drums instead of disks, I think you can even add PDP-1s
--yes PDP-ONEs not PDP-11s--at Project MAC into the mix.  That gets us
back to, say, 1964.

   But let's go a little farther...  The Univac division of Remington
Rand built two LARC computer systems in the mid 50's. (One for Los
Alamos and one for the Navy's David Taylor Model Basin.) They
consisted of a high-speed binary computer and a decimal computer which
mostly did I/O and binary/decimal conversion.  How did they
communicate?  Via a shared drum.

   But that should come as no surprise...the first delivered product
from Eckhart-Mauchley Computer Corporation, the ancestor of Univac,
was the BINAC, a dual processor fault-tolerant computer.  BINAC was
originally purchased by the new US Air Force for use on board
aircraft.  Of course this was pushing the limits of both aircraft and
computers in the forties, but it did result in pioneering work on
shared I/O devices. ;-)
--

					Robert I. Eachus

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