alt Hacker NewsOhh...I guess I had moved off them before cpu switches. I heard they ported Unix to Stratus as well - Did you ever get a chance to play with it ? was it any good ?
I think VOS being PL/1 based pretty cool - Stratus (and Intel fab PL/M stuff) was the only time I've ever gotten to work with PL/1...
The Stratus shops I was at (one financial, one transportation, one communications) considered the Stratus platform to be the holy of holies and mere mortals not on the Stratus group didn't get stick time on the actual systems. I was doing GRC type work with those guys, so I was definitely not on the Cool Kids Team.
That said, from what I gather from working with those guys, there are a couple of generations of unix-y things on Stratus:
1) The older FTX Unix was apparently a pretty bog standard SVR4 port from the user perspective, with the machdep stuff and scaffolding to deal with the fault tolerance layered on a VOS based abstraction layer in the kernel. I knew a lot about SVR4 at one time, long ago, so they chatted me up quite a bit about that.
2) Later they added a POSIX layer to VOS and ported a bunch of Unix tools (e.g. GCC). I dunno exactly what the business case is here or why people who want Unix wouldn't just live in the Unix environment. Neither did anyone else I talked to.
3) These days, I understand people are running Linux (RHEL) as well as windows as on top of VOS. All the worlds virtualized these days.
I obviously didn't get to code anything on the Stratus, but agree PL/1 is interesting as a systems language (the other big user being IBM of course). I understand 'Stratus PL/1' is a lot like 'Burroughs Large Systems Algol': they started out there and have kept adding vendor specific extensions to the point it's not really the base language any more. At least IBM gives it new names when what the programmers use drifts far enough from the base language definition (e.g. PL.8).