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The file system of an integrated local network – Apollo File System (1985)

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Re: The file system of an integrated local network – Apollo File System (1985)

#11

Post by imglorp »

djthorpe wrote: post #4

I used to use Apollo workstations in the late 1980's (probably around 1988). I used to have a DN3000 on my desk with a massive CRT monitor. They were pretty heavily used in my company for CAE work, designing printed circuit boards, schematics and later VLSI design. We moved from software called "Racal Redac Visula" to Mentor Graphics at some point. They were indeed well ahead of their time. I could open a "pad" in th…

The Unix flavor wars were in progress, so as a response they had another interesting innovation, which was a complete set of executables for each different flavor, including I think Domain, BSD, and SysV variants.

Each flavor had some bin directories with a text oriented symlink like /usr/$OS_FLAVOR/bin (I forget the path) but the interesting thing is that symbolic links were always resolved per process, every access, using the environment.

Oh and they also were waging the windowing wars at the time, so they tried to support all of X10 and maybe X11, as well as that Pad arrangement.

Re: The file system of an integrated local network – Apollo File System (1985)

#12

Post by justin_ »

jacobush wrote: post #10

Windows file sharing (and by extension Samba) came from Apollo. It's little known: https://www.oocities.org/zuhair_ali/linux/samba.html

That's right. The RPC transport names in Windows are still prefixed with "nca", a reference to the Network Computing Architecture from Apollo.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/rpc/choosing-...

Re: The file system of an integrated local network – Apollo File System (1985)

#13

Post by dn3500 »

imglorp wrote: post #11
djthorpe wrote: post #4

I used to use Apollo workstations in the late 1980's (probably around 1988). I used to have a DN3000 on my desk with a massive CRT monitor. They were pretty heavily used in my company for CAE work, designing printed circuit boards, schematics and later VLSI design. We moved from software called "Racal Redac Visula" to Mentor Graphics at some point. They were indeed well ahead of their time. I could open a "pad" in th…

The Unix flavor wars were in progress, so as a response they had another interesting innovation, which was a complete set of executables for each different flavor, including I think Domain, BSD, and SysV variants. Each flavor had some bin directories with a text oriented symlink like /usr/$OS_FLAVOR/bin (I forget the path) but the interesting thing is that symbolic links were always resolved per process, every access…

These were officially called "variant" links. Within Apollo R&D they were known as "deviant" links. They got the idea from Pyramid.

Apollo's downfall was that they clung to their proprietary OS long after everyone else had switched to Unix. They kept putting more lipstick (compatibility layers) on the pig (Domain/OS) but it wasn't enough. To be fair, at the time Apollo was founded commercial Unix wasn't possible because of licensing issues. By the time Sun was founded just a couple years later Unix was the way to go.

Re: The file system of an integrated local network – Apollo File System (1985)

#15

Post by EvanAnderson »

jacobush wrote: post #10

Windows file sharing (and by extension Samba) came from Apollo. It's little known: https://www.oocities.org/zuhair_ali/linux/samba.html

A nit to pick - MSRPC came from Apollo RPC, but SMB came from IBM: http://ubiqx.org/cifs/SMB.html

Re: The file system of an integrated local network – Apollo File System (1985)

#16

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

tankenmate wrote: post #5

I remember using DOMAIN/OS computers at university in 1990, by then it had been acquired by HP. The biggest difference from Unix I first ran into was that you couldn't always kill processes with kill -9, sometimes you had to "Blast" the process if it was waiting / hung on a network lock.

Seems similar to having zombies when doing that under Linux and the BSDs.

Re: The file system of an integrated local network – Apollo File System (1985)

#17

Post by jacobush »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #15
jacobush wrote: post #10

Windows file sharing (and by extension Samba) came from Apollo. It's little known: https://www.oocities.org/zuhair_ali/linux/samba.html

A nit to pick - MSRPC came from Apollo RPC, but SMB came from IBM: http://ubiqx.org/cifs/SMB.html

Another little tidbit which is not much known:

Furthermore, I didn't find out that Samba inter-operated at all with any version of DOS or Windows until nearly two years after I did that first release. The earliest versions of Samba were aimed at being compatible with clients for the Digital Equipment Corporation "Pathworks" product suite, which was an early implementation of the SMB protocol that was quite popular at the time, and that ran on Ultrix and VMS systems. My initial motivation was to implement the same protocol on SunOS, so that I could use my desktop system to access the departmental Unix server. -- Andrew Tridgell

(Weird - my hospital also has those IBM Type-1 token ring jacks.)

Re: The file system of an integrated local network – Apollo File System (1985)

#18

Post by tankenmate »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #16
tankenmate wrote: post #5

I remember using DOMAIN/OS computers at university in 1990, by then it had been acquired by HP. The biggest difference from Unix I first ran into was that you couldn't always kill processes with kill -9, sometimes you had to "Blast" the process if it was waiting / hung on a network lock.

Seems similar to having zombies when doing that under Linux and the BSDs.

A zombie process is a process that has exit()ed but hasn't been reaped (wait(), et al) by its parent yet; a different mechanic that has to do with keeping the child's exit status and process statistics due to wait() being asynchronous, not to do with network locks.

Re: The file system of an integrated local network – Apollo File System (1985)

#19

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

tankenmate wrote: post #18
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems similar to having zombies when doing that under Linux and the BSDs.

A zombie process is a process that has exit()ed but hasn't been reaped (wait(), et al) by its parent yet; a different mechanic that has to do with keeping the child's exit status and process statistics due to wait() being asynchronous, not to do with network locks.

From an endusers point of view(who couldn't care less about the internals), killdashnining anything which had open files over NFS resulted in Z in ps, pstree, top, htop etc. in my experience.
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