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PancakesCantKillMe@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

I’ve administered this OS, which for us was used to develop images on plates for printing. It ran atop ATT UNIX and had to be “defragged” every now and again to regain contiguous space back. This process involved backing up the system to 250MB QIC tapes (twice for two sets of tapes), wiping the disks and then restoring the data from tape. This was an all-weekend process and really sucked if a tape broke, but that’s why there were two sets and scotch tape can work in a pinch when the other tape is bad.

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Goun@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Sounds like a dream job! How long ago was this?

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- PancakesCantKillMe@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Veritably, a lifetime ago.
  
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Pipster@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I worked for a company that still supports a critical healthcare system that runs on Rocket U2 on AIX which is an evolution of PICK.

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- PancakesCantKillMe@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  It is so funny to hear about “critical” systems that run ancient OSes and I’ve supported my fair share of those environments. I did love AIX as well. Smitty (and F6) teaching me UNIX commands early in my career was a great help.
  
  Was Rocket U2 still written in Pick Basic?
  
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  - Pipster@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    I think so? I think ours used UniVerse whixh used UniBasic and UniQuery. I never had to use it in anger, I was mostly focused on supporting a different thing written in VB6…
    
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AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Wait, it’s an OS, but it runs on top of Unix?

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- PancakesCantKillMe@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Yes. Same as Windows 3.1 running atop DOS. I would say it doesn’t truly qualify as an operating system because of its dependence on a parent OS. Perhaps it’s more of an operating environment.
  
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  - AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    I see. Thanks.
    
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- SlurpingPus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Iirc some mainframe OSes, like z/OS or whatever, support running different OSes atop them.
  
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  - AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Isn’t that in some kind of virtual machines?
    
    I’m not familiar with those, the only “big” machines I worked with were Tandem.
    
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    SlurpingPus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Idk for sure, haven’t properly looked into it. Just read in passing that mainframes were doing this kind of thing for ages.
    
    Wikipedia says regarding z/OS:
    
    z/OS has a Workload Manager (WLM) and dispatcher which automatically manages numerous concurrently hosted units of work running in separate key-protected address spaces according to dynamically adjustable goals. This capability inherently supports multi-tenancy within a single operating system image. However, modern IBM mainframes also offer two additional levels of virtualization: LPARs and (optionally) z/VM.
    
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