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[–] 84 points 7 months ago (15 children)

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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  • [+] 14 points 7 months ago (5 children)
  • [–] 14 points 7 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Although I can almost guarantee someone is still doing things that way even today.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

    Nah, anything like that is at least a virtual tape at this point.

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  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    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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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    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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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (5 children)

    Wait, it's an OS, but it runs on top of Unix?

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

    Iirc some mainframe OSes, like z/OS or whatever, support running different OSes atop them.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    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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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago*

    Idk for sure, haven't properly looked into it. Just read in passing that mainframes were doing this kind of thing for ages. Mainframe software generally has stuff that's pretty weird by today's standards, I need to read up on it sometime.

    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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