I am really (unpleasantly) surprised that a machine as iconic and important as the Cray has been lost in time. At least some brave soul managed to recover parts of it.
Sad, and extraordinary. The Cray X-MP was famously used to create the graphics for "The Last Starfighter". All the ray-tracing code and the models that it was fed must once have existed, and no doubt now is gone forever.
@@sundhaug92 "The Last Starfighter" computer graphics were made by a company called Digital Productions, who also worked on "2010" and "Labyrinth". They were bought out in 1986 by a company which went bankrupt in 1987, so heaven knows what became of their intellectual property after that. I can discover only that they did it all in FORTRAN, which given the state of the art at the time is not surprising.
I've been a Cray nerd since I read Jurassic Park as a kid. I own a small piece of a board an IC from the Cray 1 originally installed at Lawrence Livermore. They've always been fascinating machines to me.
Was I the only one surprised and humored to see MSN Messenger included in the XP install? They stripped it down to the bare essentials but still included MSN Messenger. Oh, Microsoft!
Floppy and tape installs - yep, back when I didn't have gray hair. I managed to read a whole BUNCH of novels during installs (and collected overtime) 🙂
Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PC was awesome. A decade ago I set up a Pentium 3 with it for text editing with AbiWord for my grandma. The system worked like a champ for years. Very light and very stable. I think it still works but it's been sitting in the attic for a long time.
@@lvl90dru1d IDK, probably not. Official minimum requirement are Pentium 233 MHz and 64 MB of RAM. But maybe it can be persuaded to go lower than that. Edit: apparently people got XP on a 486 so in that case it should be possible to do so with Win FLP.
I've been daily driving FLP for a pretty long time, as I had the EEE PC 701 as my main laptop. It was actually pretty popular among people who used these laptops, at least in Russia. I moved to better laptops and proper Windows / Linux not too long after though lol.
Windows FLP is not actually the final release of the Windows XP codebase, that would be Windows XP Embedded POSReady 2009. That release actually got patches longer than plain XP did, so many people applied a registry hack to convince Windows Update they’re on that version.
@@NCommander The original XP embedded was a DIY build-your-own-Windows thing, POSReady was a normal installable OS and its installer experience was similar to FLP’s.
I still have and use XP in a VM (qemu/kvm) with word/excel 2003. It had that POSready registry patch, to pull updates a bit longer. This is my "SunPCi" equivalent for office and accounting work, I never got along with more modern office releases with the ribbon UI, nor I could migrate to other office tools - the best I have is google sheets, but for DOC files I need a total control over the creation process (not that it has no bugs, but I know all the quirks by now - no surprises and pulling my hair). The rendering is decent, using MacType on it. The Firefox is a bit struggling with modern sites though.
Not too sure if you know this but Apple did release beta versions of Mac OS X Server under the name Rhapsody that not only supported PowerPC but also x86 computers too. iirc it's one of the only times Apple made an operating system for typical desktop computers and pre dates Apple's transition to Intel processors by around 5 years.
Its amazing how many pieces of software were out there. Being able to see all of this from the screen of a cell phone is amazing in many ways by itself. Great job!!
The Cray segment reminds me of the MVS Turnkey System emulator that emulates an IBM System/370 machine. I’ve only messed around a little bit, but the sheer difference in how you interact with the mainframe system vs modern computers is wild
the entire philosophy of OS design originated from the idea of "batch computing" most likely because it was annoying, time consuming and took up a lot of system time. There's a good bit of material out there and OS's are quite complicated these days, it's quite the technological innovation really.
@@mieszkogulinski168 kind of, except for the fact that batch computing is very much "you are doing this one task" which was fine back in the days of punch cards, because you would just hand the operator a stack of punch cards, and they would feed them, running the program. But ever since remote terminals became a thing, it doesn't make any sense, even for super computers, because with an OS level breakout, you can dynamically allocate the supercomputer to any number of tasks. Without having to start or stop them.
The way to think of a traditional Cray vector computer is as a compute server. You don't interact directly with the Cray, you use a front-end computer which runs any software environment you like, and send computation intensive work to the Cray.
We were dealing with Crays for a few years at the department I worked at. They were a shit of a thing to work with. The VMS machines were a peach comparitively.
At my college, my class built a very basic MUD in the Harris minicomputer JCL. Plusses and minuses. Plus: That game got popular and got its own user ID via the sysops. Negative: This was because it was the last year for the Harris, which was scrapped the next year.
Out of space on the last disk... damn! Welcome back! Edit: I used to daily WinFLP on main PC (dual p3 @ 1ghz). The only thing missing that I needed was tape drive support.
Microsoft has actually started to offer prebuilt ARM ISOs for MSDN subscribers. The 23H2 IoT Enterprise image (which allows either Enterprise or IoT Enterprise to be installed) is available and works fine under Parallels. I believe I've heard there's another program Microsoft has that has offered ARM images (beyond Insider), but only used MSDN myself. Of course as other commenters have noted Parallels has streamlined the process of installing from public sources for awhile now so mostly just trivia that the ISOs exist.
For Windows 11 on Arm64 part. I actually have 2 ARM devices that natively runs Windows 11. I used UUP Dump to create Windows 11 ISO. One device is a notebook from Xiaomi, that device actually uses UEFI and Windows 11 preinstalled. The other is an 855 phone that uses WoA Project that their Mu implementation to replace stock Android. To be honest, currently, only EAC protected and Vulkan games aren't working. Even Warcraft 2 is playable!
SUPER-UX and its cousin ESOS are likely to be lost to history. SUPER-UX was a UNIX variant used on NEC's SX line of vector supercomputers up until Linux was adopted. ESOS was the operating system for the Earth Simulator and the Earth Simulator 2. Many older Cray systems- and this included the CDC 6600 and 7600- ran the operating system in the I/O processors to allow the main processor to be free to work on computing tasks. This was also true of many CDC CYBER systems.
Enjoyed the Cray section a lot. I doubt a lot of this has been lost. They will most likely be locked behind company, military, scientific and other propriety archives. The nature of these machines meant most software was most likely custom code and generalised computing outside of the OS would be rare.
The hyper floppy install reminds me of installing OS2 in 1993. I believe it was 103 disks all up, which at $149 retail was cheaper than buying that many floppies, and those IBM ones were good ones..
Whenever you have a tape in hand that was created on a UNIX machine, you can safely assume it has been created with TAR, the Tape ARchiver. So, the only thing you need to do in theory is to read it with a TAR program on any platform (provided of course, you have a tape drive that can read the tape and you have drivers for that tape drive on some host OS). I used TAR even on OS/2 for making backups. Tape drives were also common on MS-DOS.
TAR isn’t a single format unfortunately. GNU tar uses a different format, and there are a several of them that have come and gone over time (PAX, star, GNU tar, e.t.c.). They’re often not that different, but can differ in what level of metadata and features are supported (extended attributes, symlinks, hard links, e.t.c.).
I wonder if the guy who did that Cray recovery contacted the Chippewa Falls Museum Of Industry that collected a bunch of Cray stuff to see if they have any tapes
I guess my reply got filtered because it has a link in it, it's a small volunteer run museum in Seymour Cray's hometown that collected a bunch of his notes and hardware examples
I actually used windows FLP back in the day in my Pentium 3 back in the day. I forget what if any problems it had but it was after id given Linux a few test spins and I remember it being an overall fun time.
I run Windows 11 for ARM using VMWare player on MacOS Silicon. There are hacks to get around the “connect to Network” issue, as you show. It didn’t crash, and has been very stable, and runs x32 and x64 windows apps seamlessly.
It is almost like Cray borrowed a lot from CDC's NOS. I remember some of that. That would be a fun project. Bringing back the Cyber Network Operating Systems (NOS and NOS/VE). That was a cool OS and machine series.
I had to port some C software to Unicos and was instantly made aware that word addressing wasn't the same as byte addressing that I'd got used to. Lots of assumptions needed revisited.
Dell UNIX was sold with their PowerLine Workstations like the elusive 433DE+, which oddly took a CPU which plugged into a mezzanine card on one side of the mainboard, and had a 4-character green alphanumeric LED display for system status.
X11 needs the x86config file (at least in the early Linux kernel and Slackware distro days. You need to figure out all of the dot pitch, and H and V timing parameters to be entered. I did it a bunch of times back in the mid-90s, but have forgotten how most of it works now... Might need to pull all the old readmes! but you probably knew that already... :)
Recall installing various versions of AT&T Unix that used a similar number of disks. Oracle RDBMS was another enthusiastic diskette user. Building BSD Unix on a PDP was also lots and lots of fun, configuring and messing with the various setups of hardware that were available. BSD on Vaxen was relatively simple.
Really great job all around. I used to fuss with putting old versions of windows into VMs. It was great fun, but after it's all said and done, you realize you have something that isn't terribly functional. It would be great to create all of these OS's as VM's so everybody could play with them on their own PCs.
I actually genuinely want to reconstruct a Cray to use off to the side on a Unix workstation network. They just don't make Computer Graphics, art, and CAD software like that for modern computers. I love everything about these old systems.
The Dell disks... they could all be treated as block devices, and if they are you could just smack the images together into one large image and run tar/cpio on that.
Maybe you could try looking at beta versions of Windows? There’s some interesting stuff floating around in those like the fact early versions of Chicago have the unused ability to use explorer tabs the Windows 8 start screen esque activity centers from Neptune and beta ME or the variety of weird things from longhorn like Microsoft MAX or WinFS (which interestingly near the end got a separate installable beta release for Windows XP sp2 before being cancelled)
7:05 "many bits and pieces from Windows such as fast user switching in an effort to remove unnecessary bloat." Whaaaaat??? No way! Microsoft knew there was unnecessary bloat in their operating system???
COS is one thing, UNICOS which supposedly is more UNIX-like another. Under the hood Cray machines were tuned for the most extreme performance including rather simple memory management units. Iow, Cray vector machines had no PMMU unlike anything that is running a modern "real" UNIX or Linux. And that difference meant porting any software that was doing its own memory management had the potential to be ... entertaining. There were other differences and no I'm not Cray bashing, after all I used to have Cray email address 🙂 Things weren't really standardized in those days so porting between Unices was often non-trivial. But Cray certainly stood out. At the end Crays delivered earthshattering floatingpoint performance and that's what Cray users wanted.
I'm surprised you chose that method to install windows 11 arm. I have a mac m1 running Parallels that automatically installs Windows 11 arm and it runs beautifully! I have also worked on throwing every x86 app I can at it and it works!
I worked on CrayII machines. They were booted off of an ATT PC using UNIX. It was much simpler that booting the XMP. Later versions of the C2 had 16 CPU's
There is official ARM64 ISOs, just they are only provided to volume licencing customers. Probably the best and easiest to set up option would be the W10 LTSC 2021 ARM64 ISO (as Windows 10 does not require secure boot or TPM), of which a public mirror exists at massgrave (file name en-us_windows_10_iot_enterprise_ltsc_2021_arm64_dvd_e8d4fc46.iso). You can also use the W11 LTSC 2024 ARM64 ISO (file name 26100.1.240331-1435.ge_release_CLIENT_ENTERPRISES_OEM_A64FRE_en-us.iso), which also does not have secure boot or TPM requirements (assuming you select the IoT edition during setup), however it is significantly slower.
UNIX PCs of this era would include DOS so that they could market a PC that could run DOS apps but also natively talk to their UNIX networks. So DOS would run on top and UNIX would handle the interoperability. AT&T also did this with their UNX PC line.
43 disks. That makes me feel better about installing the Windows 95 Preview from 27 floppies!! Luckily I was getting paid to do it! When I was done with that, I installed Slackware to compare the two. :)
I don't get your analogy. To me (a former Cray Research employee), the vector machines with only a few processors are the only real Crays. That technology was a success in its time, but it was carried about as far as it could go. The massively parallel machines are another thing altogether, whatever they are called. I don't know much about them, frankly.
I have a few CDC disk packs which may contain cray software and am currently restoring a suitable drive. Unfortunately the disk pack likely to have a OS is crashed and isn't recoverable
I run Windows for Arm64 on the daily on my M2 Pro Mac mini using parallels. It runs like a dream. I can run a ton of x86 and x64 games on it, and it runs things like visual studio _faster_ than my high end windows work laptop.
I was surprised to hear that there was a lack of emulated tape drives in PC emulators, especially given the prevalence of them in emulators for various home computers, and the extensive track-record of tape being used for backups. Wonder if there's any possibility for reusing code from those to make virtual PC tape drives?
Home computers recording data as encoded audio on compact cassettes has little to do with actual magnetic tape data storage. Even with modern hypervisors, the best we have is generic SCSI passthrough (maybe even over iSCSI) of physical tape hardware.
Tape drives were never super standardized on 90s x86. There's a bunch of floppy controlled based ones, and others that were SCSI based. However, most emulators for x86 mostly deal w/ Windows and DOS where tapes just weren't common.
@@NCommander Ah, lack of standardisation. That explains a lot! Which of the 50 different parallel-port tape drives are you going to emulate? I suppose the SCSI ones might be a bit better, but there was probably still a lot of variation. Oh, and let's not forget the outright proprietary ones that would have come with their own ISA controller card. Ouch.
Hi I don't know how you process your voice over but it seems to me that your noise gate is a bit too agressive. A dB lower might give better results, right now it just sounds as though your voice is being clipped off on certain syllables.
With Windows 11 on ARM, one of the only ways Microsoft officially supports running it on MacBooks is through the paid software Parallels Desktop. Why Microsoft hasn't properly reached out to Apple to supply everything needed for an Apple Silicon Boot Camp I have no idea. Probably because of ARM versions of the Surface still existing within the lineup, alongside the Qualcomm deal.
I actually have used the Windows 11 for ARM64 on my Mac machine. It’s definitely hard to install if you choose UTM, but I elected to use Parallels instead, because it’s actually a supported way of running it. The performance is genuinely not bad, and I now own a unique Windows 11 Pro for ARM64 product key. Additionally, Parallels fully automates the annoying download and install process for you, making the installation completely painless. Regarding the experience: it’s not bad! Performance is acceptable, but I haven’t the opportunity to test any unusual apps on it. The x86 compatibility layer is much better too, since it finally supports 64 bit apps. Overall: 6/10. Pretty good experience running Windows only apps on my M1 Pro MacBook.
uugghhh.... I was hoping to never hear JCL ever again. On a raised floor, far, far away (in time), I learned to bring up mainframe MVS XA from a notebook 2 inches thick... then you had to run JCL to actually start jobs. I'll have nightmares again tonight.
I would love more x86 Unix. It's probably not everyone's cup of tea, but as someone who grew up with Linux, seeing how the distant cold cousin of Linux works is very interesting.
Hmm Parallels on my Mac will automatically download the ISO and install Windows 11 ARM64. It does so in a few clicks you just add the key or buy license from MS store.
I installed Dell SVR4 on real hardware a long time ago and hit the same disk space issue.... I ended up just slapping Tenox's Bochs image down onto a real hard drive and it worked.
8:58 Partitionning scheme: Mac OS UFS, Mac OS Server UFS ,Default MkLinux, Preferred MkLinux, Preferred LinuxPPC, Default A/UX Some cursed option here.
Very interesting. I'm kinda tempted to make a USB stick for a GoTek with the Dell UNIX OS and try to install it on actual hardware. Though 1) I don't really know the first thing about UNIX and 2) do I want the potential hassle? I dunno, but could be an experience either way.
I am really (unpleasantly) surprised that a machine as iconic and important as the Cray has been lost in time. At least some brave soul managed to recover parts of it.
Sad, and extraordinary. The Cray X-MP was famously used to create the graphics for "The Last Starfighter". All the ray-tracing code and the models that it was fed must once have existed, and no doubt now is gone forever.
@@zh84 Hopefully it's still one some tape somewhere in a closet
@@sundhaug92 "The Last Starfighter" computer graphics were made by a company called Digital Productions, who also worked on "2010" and "Labyrinth". They were bought out in 1986 by a company which went bankrupt in 1987, so heaven knows what became of their intellectual property after that. I can discover only that they did it all in FORTRAN, which given the state of the art at the time is not surprising.
I've been a Cray nerd since I read Jurassic Park as a kid. I own a small piece of a board an IC from the Cray 1 originally installed at Lawrence Livermore. They've always been fascinating machines to me.
@@ReallyBadJuJuI have a cray 1 piece in a mini museum. Pretty cool 😎
I hope that whoever stuck "D E L L" in that X root menu got a raise.
Was I the only one surprised and humored to see MSN Messenger included in the XP install? They stripped it down to the bare essentials but still included MSN Messenger. Oh, Microsoft!
Being able to PM your buddies was _really_ important for businesses that were still running NT4/98, okay??????????????
It was a part of the system components probably they forgot to took it out
That was an optional component that could be turned off during initial installation
My grandfather worked for Control Data for like 35years love seeing CDC and Cray stuff
Floppy and tape installs - yep, back when I didn't have gray hair. I managed to read a whole BUNCH of novels during installs (and collected overtime) 🙂
I'm a little jealous
Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PC was awesome. A decade ago I set up a Pentium 3 with it for text editing with AbiWord for my grandma. The system worked like a champ for years. Very light and very stable. I think it still works but it's been sitting in the attic for a long time.
but can it work on 66 Mhz 486 system?
@@lvl90dru1d IDK, probably not. Official minimum requirement are Pentium 233 MHz and 64 MB of RAM. But maybe it can be persuaded to go lower than that.
Edit: apparently people got XP on a 486 so in that case it should be possible to do so with Win FLP.
@@AlexandruVoda thanks
I've been daily driving FLP for a pretty long time, as I had the EEE PC 701 as my main laptop. It was actually pretty popular among people who used these laptops, at least in Russia. I moved to better laptops and proper Windows / Linux not too long after though lol.
Windows FLP is not actually the final release of the Windows XP codebase, that would be Windows XP Embedded POSReady 2009. That release actually got patches longer than plain XP did, so many people applied a registry hack to convince Windows Update they’re on that version.
I thought POSReady was a service pack to the existing XP Embedded vs. an actual new cut.
@@NCommander The original XP embedded was a DIY build-your-own-Windows thing, POSReady was a normal installable OS and its installer experience was similar to FLP’s.
That might be worth a look in and of itself, I wasn't aware of that.
I still have and use XP in a VM (qemu/kvm) with word/excel 2003. It had that POSready registry patch, to pull updates a bit longer. This is my "SunPCi" equivalent for office and accounting work, I never got along with more modern office releases with the ribbon UI, nor I could migrate to other office tools - the best I have is google sheets, but for DOC files I need a total control over the creation process (not that it has no bugs, but I know all the quirks by now - no surprises and pulling my hair). The rendering is decent, using MacType on it. The Firefox is a bit struggling with modern sites though.
Not too sure if you know this but Apple did release beta versions of Mac OS X Server under the name Rhapsody that not only supported PowerPC but also x86 computers too. iirc it's one of the only times Apple made an operating system for typical desktop computers and pre dates Apple's transition to Intel processors by around 5 years.
That's essentially just a continuation of NeXTstep for x86, but yeah, it was.
Its amazing how many pieces of software were out there. Being able to see all of this from the screen of a cell phone is amazing in many ways by itself.
Great job!!
The Cray segment reminds me of the MVS Turnkey System emulator that emulates an IBM System/370 machine. I’ve only messed around a little bit, but the sheer difference in how you interact with the mainframe system vs modern computers is wild
the entire philosophy of OS design originated from the idea of "batch computing" most likely because it was annoying, time consuming and took up a lot of system time.
There's a good bit of material out there and OS's are quite complicated these days, it's quite the technological innovation really.
@@killingtimeitself for supercomputing applications, the idea of "submit a job to be processed" still makes sense
@@mieszkogulinski168 kind of, except for the fact that batch computing is very much "you are doing this one task" which was fine back in the days of punch cards, because you would just hand the operator a stack of punch cards, and they would feed them, running the program.
But ever since remote terminals became a thing, it doesn't make any sense, even for super computers, because with an OS level breakout, you can dynamically allocate the supercomputer to any number of tasks. Without having to start or stop them.
The way to think of a traditional Cray vector computer is as a compute server. You don't interact directly with the Cray, you use a front-end computer which runs any software environment you like, and send computation intensive work to the Cray.
Hey, hey ! ncommander is back !! yay ! And with more pain and suffering than ever, obviously ! :)
I love watching his streams
We were dealing with Crays for a few years at the department I worked at. They were a shit of a thing to work with. The VMS machines were a peach comparitively.
At my college, my class built a very basic MUD in the Harris minicomputer JCL. Plusses and minuses. Plus: That game got popular and got its own user ID via the sysops. Negative: This was because it was the last year for the Harris, which was scrapped the next year.
So good to see you back.
Awesome that you tried SPRITE. I remember running it on Sun and DEC hardware back in the mid 90s.
Out of space on the last disk... damn! Welcome back! Edit: I used to daily WinFLP on main PC (dual p3 @ 1ghz). The only thing missing that I needed was tape drive support.
Microsoft has actually started to offer prebuilt ARM ISOs for MSDN subscribers. The 23H2 IoT Enterprise image (which allows either Enterprise or IoT Enterprise to be installed) is available and works fine under Parallels. I believe I've heard there's another program Microsoft has that has offered ARM images (beyond Insider), but only used MSDN myself. Of course as other commenters have noted Parallels has streamlined the process of installing from public sources for awhile now so mostly just trivia that the ISOs exist.
17:40 I just realised, that in Max Payne 1, when you have to disable Nicole Horne's office security system, you have to destroy Cray super-computers.
For Windows 11 on Arm64 part. I actually have 2 ARM devices that natively runs Windows 11. I used UUP Dump to create Windows 11 ISO. One device is a notebook from Xiaomi, that device actually uses UEFI and Windows 11 preinstalled. The other is an 855 phone that uses WoA Project that their Mu implementation to replace stock Android. To be honest, currently, only EAC protected and Vulkan games aren't working. Even Warcraft 2 is playable!
SUPER-UX and its cousin ESOS are likely to be lost to history. SUPER-UX was a UNIX variant used on NEC's SX line of vector supercomputers up until Linux was adopted. ESOS was the operating system for the Earth Simulator and the Earth Simulator 2.
Many older Cray systems- and this included the CDC 6600 and 7600- ran the operating system in the I/O processors to allow the main processor to be free to work on computing tasks. This was also true of many CDC CYBER systems.
Enjoyed the Cray section a lot. I doubt a lot of this has been lost. They will most likely be locked behind company, military, scientific and other propriety archives. The nature of these machines meant most software was most likely custom code and generalised computing outside of the OS would be rare.
I was just looking at your channel last night and hoping you were doing well. Made my day to see another video come up! 😃
The hyper floppy install reminds me of installing OS2 in 1993. I believe it was 103 disks all up, which at $149 retail was cheaper than buying that many floppies, and those IBM ones were good ones..
Whenever you have a tape in hand that was created on a UNIX machine, you can safely assume it has been created with TAR, the Tape ARchiver. So, the only thing you need to do in theory is to read it with a TAR program on any platform (provided of course, you have a tape drive that can read the tape and you have drivers for that tape drive on some host OS). I used TAR even on OS/2 for making backups. Tape drives were also common on MS-DOS.
TAR isn’t a single format unfortunately. GNU tar uses a different format, and there are a several of them that have come and gone over time (PAX, star, GNU tar, e.t.c.). They’re often not that different, but can differ in what level of metadata and features are supported (extended attributes, symlinks, hard links, e.t.c.).
the simple fact that COS is terribly unfriendly to the user, and not existing in any modern capacity is quite poetic
I wonder if the guy who did that Cray recovery contacted the Chippewa Falls Museum Of Industry that collected a bunch of Cray stuff to see if they have any tapes
Do you have more information on this? I haven't heard that before.
I guess my reply got filtered because it has a link in it, it's a small volunteer run museum in Seymour Cray's hometown that collected a bunch of his notes and hardware examples
I have no idea if it's a glitch or if my replies are being removed, I'm really sorry
About the Cray software. So this is what extinction feels like.
Still it enjoys copyright protection until 70 years after the last Cray engineer passes away.
I actually used windows FLP back in the day in my Pentium 3 back in the day. I forget what if any problems it had but it was after id given Linux a few test spins and I remember it being an overall fun time.
I run Windows 11 for ARM using VMWare player on MacOS Silicon. There are hacks to get around the “connect to Network” issue, as you show. It didn’t crash, and has been very stable, and runs x32 and x64 windows apps seamlessly.
It is almost like Cray borrowed a lot from CDC's NOS. I remember some of that.
That would be a fun project. Bringing back the Cyber Network Operating Systems (NOS and NOS/VE). That was a cool OS and machine series.
Many Cray employees came from the CDC 6000 world. I worked in the SCOPE environment, myself.
I had to port some C software to Unicos and was instantly made aware that word addressing wasn't the same as byte addressing that I'd got used to. Lots of assumptions needed revisited.
nice to see a new video from you! always a treat
Dell UNIX was sold with their PowerLine Workstations like the elusive 433DE+, which oddly took a CPU which plugged into a mezzanine card on one side of the mainboard, and had a 4-character green alphanumeric LED display for system status.
X11 needs the x86config file (at least in the early Linux kernel and Slackware distro days. You need to figure out all of the dot pitch, and H and V timing parameters to be entered.
I did it a bunch of times back in the mid-90s, but have forgotten how most of it works now... Might need to pull all the old readmes! but you probably knew that already... :)
+1 for UNICOS in a future video!
Recall installing various versions of AT&T Unix that used a similar number of disks. Oracle RDBMS was another enthusiastic diskette user. Building BSD Unix on a PDP was also lots and lots of fun, configuring and messing with the various setups of hardware that were available. BSD on Vaxen was relatively simple.
"An effort to remove unnecessary bloat"
*MSN messenger is running*
Really great job all around. I used to fuss with putting old versions of windows into VMs. It was great fun, but after it's all said and done, you realize you have something that isn't terribly functional.
It would be great to create all of these OS's as VM's so everybody could play with them on their own PCs.
COS was the epitome of user friendliness :)
32 + 43 floppies, ouch. Isn't there something like a Floppy Emu that you can copy the disks too first.
I actually genuinely want to reconstruct a Cray to use off to the side on a Unix workstation network. They just don't make Computer Graphics, art, and CAD software like that for modern computers.
I love everything about these old systems.
this makes me wonder what's on the CDC disk pack i have in the garage
Unexpected and yet AMAZING video from NCommander! I'm speechless, thank you, thank you, thank you!
The Dell disks... they could all be treated as block devices, and if they are you could just smack the images together into one large image and run tar/cpio on that.
btw some computers in box86 supports tape. Mostly the 8086 and 8088 computers.
The homecomputer-style cassette deck of the IBM PC and Jr. are meant to use with ROM BASIC and unrelated to actual magnetic tape drives.
New video! Thank you very much! Hope you're doing well, glad to see you back 💞
14:45 dude where were you just 3 weeks ago when I had this same exact issue with my supermicro board? that was HOURS of research :D
Great I was going to watch this and then go to sleep but now I'll probably be up for 4 more hours reading about COS
so happy to see a new video from you! i guess the windows 11 on arm64 stuff sucks at least partially because of the Qualcomm exclusivity agreement...
oh yeah i remember installings unixes from scsi tape and even boot from tape. that was neat.
Omg NCommander is back! It's been a whole year what happened?
I've been livestreaming but uh, its been bad. I have a summary on Patreon.
The C in COS actually stands for "Chippewa"
Five vintage operating systems using legacy? What? I put a notification to watch this stream.
Amiga, Atari, Apple, Microsoft, and now Dell… all had a Unix System V release but all killed it pretty quickly, why?
@4:50 now that's a smart customisation there Dell...
Maybe you could try looking at beta versions of Windows? There’s some interesting stuff floating around in those like the fact early versions of Chicago have the unused ability to use explorer tabs the Windows 8 start screen esque activity centers from Neptune and beta ME or the variety of weird things from longhorn like Microsoft MAX or WinFS (which interestingly near the end got a separate installable beta release for Windows XP sp2 before being cancelled)
It's been on the list for awhile, but life has been beating me up as of late.
Any virtualization that can forward a device through can support a tape drive. Just forward the scsi card in and boom
This sounds remarkably like SCO install around the early 90s.
Love all your vids! Happy to see a new one, thanks for posting!
I loved flpc. Was fun to play with.
7:05 "many bits and pieces from Windows such as fast user switching in an effort to remove unnecessary bloat."
Whaaaaat??? No way! Microsoft knew there was unnecessary bloat in their operating system???
I remember installing Dell Unix from tape, but I remember doing the dozens and dozens of disks for SCO.
COS is one thing, UNICOS which supposedly is more UNIX-like another. Under the hood Cray machines were tuned for the most extreme performance including rather simple memory management units. Iow, Cray vector machines had no PMMU unlike anything that is running a modern "real" UNIX or Linux. And that difference meant porting any software that was doing its own memory management had the potential to be ... entertaining. There were other differences and no I'm not Cray bashing, after all I used to have Cray email address 🙂 Things weren't really standardized in those days so porting between Unices was often non-trivial. But Cray certainly stood out. At the end Crays delivered earthshattering floatingpoint performance and that's what Cray users wanted.
Really hope backup tapes are found
I'm surprised you chose that method to install windows 11 arm. I have a mac m1 running Parallels that automatically installs Windows 11 arm and it runs beautifully! I have also worked on throwing every x86 app I can at it and it works!
I had UTM handy, and it said it supported Windows 11 ...
@@NCommander weird thing is Parallels pulls down an actual install iso from Microsoft site
You are still alive yey
Yes! New NCommander video! Thanks.
I worked on CrayII machines. They were booted off of an ATT PC using UNIX. It was much simpler that booting the XMP. Later versions of the C2 had 16 CPU's
There is official ARM64 ISOs, just they are only provided to volume licencing customers. Probably the best and easiest to set up option would be the W10 LTSC 2021 ARM64 ISO (as Windows 10 does not require secure boot or TPM), of which a public mirror exists at massgrave (file name en-us_windows_10_iot_enterprise_ltsc_2021_arm64_dvd_e8d4fc46.iso). You can also use the W11 LTSC 2024 ARM64 ISO (file name 26100.1.240331-1435.ge_release_CLIENT_ENTERPRISES_OEM_A64FRE_en-us.iso), which also does not have secure boot or TPM requirements (assuming you select the IoT edition during setup), however it is significantly slower.
Gosh, I knew Windows Fundamentals really meant for me.
UNIX PCs of this era would include DOS so that they could market a PC that could run DOS apps but also natively talk to their UNIX networks. So DOS would run on top and UNIX would handle the interoperability. AT&T also did this with their UNX PC line.
4:11 Future livestream idea: Try porting OAM (sysadm) from System V to Linux. It is a part of the UNIX SVR4 source code.
43 disks. That makes me feel better about installing the Windows 95 Preview from 27 floppies!! Luckily I was getting paid to do it! When I was done with that, I installed Slackware to compare the two. :)
Windows FLP installer was taken from Longhorn
The Cray Story is really sad, like a dog waiting for it's owner that never came back.
I don't get your analogy. To me (a former Cray Research employee), the vector machines with only a few processors are the only real Crays. That technology was a success in its time, but it was carried about as far as it could go. The massively parallel machines are another thing altogether, whatever they are called. I don't know much about them, frankly.
@@GH-oi2jf the emulated system waiting for an update in the video not CRAY themselves
I have a few CDC disk packs which may contain cray software and am currently restoring a suitable drive. Unfortunately the disk pack likely to have a OS is crashed and isn't recoverable
He wasn't inactive for a year, he was just trying to edit this video in these OSes. 😁😁😁
I run Windows for Arm64 on the daily on my M2 Pro Mac mini using parallels. It runs like a dream. I can run a ton of x86 and x64 games on it, and it runs things like visual studio _faster_ than my high end windows work laptop.
I was surprised to hear that there was a lack of emulated tape drives in PC emulators, especially given the prevalence of them in emulators for various home computers, and the extensive track-record of tape being used for backups. Wonder if there's any possibility for reusing code from those to make virtual PC tape drives?
Home computers recording data as encoded audio on compact cassettes has little to do with actual magnetic tape data storage. Even with modern hypervisors, the best we have is generic SCSI passthrough (maybe even over iSCSI) of physical tape hardware.
Tape drives were never super standardized on 90s x86. There's a bunch of floppy controlled based ones, and others that were SCSI based. However, most emulators for x86 mostly deal w/ Windows and DOS where tapes just weren't common.
@@NCommander Ah, lack of standardisation. That explains a lot!
Which of the 50 different parallel-port tape drives are you going to emulate? I suppose the SCSI ones might be a bit better, but there was probably still a lot of variation. Oh, and let's not forget the outright proprietary ones that would have come with their own ISA controller card. Ouch.
Thank you for the new video!
Wow, I genuinely though I was fucking dreaming, new NC video 🎉
Welcome back my guy!
Hi I don't know how you process your voice over but it seems to me that your noise gate is a bit too agressive. A dB lower might give better results, right now it just sounds as though your voice is being clipped off on certain syllables.
This isn't my usual setup so it might take some time to work out the settings. Thanks.
you may need to use the mknod command to generate and write the correct magic numbers to the dev mount point. But you probably knew that already... :)
With Windows 11 on ARM, one of the only ways Microsoft officially supports running it on MacBooks is through the paid software Parallels Desktop. Why Microsoft hasn't properly reached out to Apple to supply everything needed for an Apple Silicon Boot Camp I have no idea. Probably because of ARM versions of the Surface still existing within the lineup, alongside the Qualcomm deal.
Would be great to have a table of contents if you could!
I actually have used the Windows 11 for ARM64 on my Mac machine. It’s definitely hard to install if you choose UTM, but I elected to use Parallels instead, because it’s actually a supported way of running it. The performance is genuinely not bad, and I now own a unique Windows 11 Pro for ARM64 product key. Additionally, Parallels fully automates the annoying download and install process for you, making the installation completely painless.
Regarding the experience: it’s not bad! Performance is acceptable, but I haven’t the opportunity to test any unusual apps on it. The x86 compatibility layer is much better too, since it finally supports 64 bit apps.
Overall: 6/10. Pretty good experience running Windows only apps on my M1 Pro MacBook.
That was my general experience once I actually got it going. I mostly included it because it fit the theme of everything I was doing.
Nice video, i might enjoy that discord server
uugghhh.... I was hoping to never hear JCL ever again. On a raised floor, far, far away (in time), I learned to bring up mainframe MVS XA from a notebook 2 inches thick... then you had to run JCL to actually start jobs. I'll have nightmares again tonight.
I would love more x86 Unix. It's probably not everyone's cup of tea, but as someone who grew up with Linux, seeing how the distant cold cousin of Linux works is very interesting.
Hmm Parallels on my Mac will automatically download the ISO and install Windows 11 ARM64. It does so in a few clicks you just add the key or buy license from MS store.
I installed Dell SVR4 on real hardware a long time ago and hit the same disk space issue.... I ended up just slapping Tenox's Bochs image down onto a real hard drive and it worked.
those are the best days every.
Strangely, My Favorite nonunix os, 9front, didn’t make the cut
Was looking for the 1 foot (1 ft.) Cray. 💡
I'd love to see a demo of GRiD OS
8:58 Partitionning scheme: Mac OS UFS, Mac OS Server UFS ,Default MkLinux, Preferred MkLinux, Preferred LinuxPPC, Default A/UX
Some cursed option here.
Very interesting. I'm kinda tempted to make a USB stick for a GoTek with the Dell UNIX OS and try to install it on actual hardware. Though 1) I don't really know the first thing about UNIX and 2) do I want the potential hassle? I dunno, but could be an experience either way.
the legend returns
very impressive sir!