[rescue] Sun 4/600 firmware found

[Adam Sampson]

Nathan Raymond <nraymond at gmail.com> writes:

>> "The very first Suns that were delivered ran a version of Unix that
>> we wrote for them, and for the first year of Sun's existence, this
>> group was their largest customer," Catmull recalls.
> Is that true? I've never heard that, and my attempts to corroborate
> that are coming up short.

Having had a trawl through the utzoo early Usenet archive, there are a
few references to a Lucasfilm 68000 UNIX and their use of Sun
workstations.

Michael Wahrman on 2nd June 1982:

| There are at least 5 different versions of UNIX currently running
| on the 68000 in some sort of workstation configuration.  They are:
|
|        i.   UNISOFT version 7
|        ii.  XENIX version 7
|        iii. Fortune version 7
|        vi.  MIT version 7
|        v.   LUCASFILM version 7

B. J. Herbison on 26th July 1982, quoting replies to a previous message:

| I know Lucasfilms, (the Star Wars Company!) has brought a 68000 Unix,
| but isn't supporting it; they should be listed in the Marin County
| (area code 415) phone book.
[...]
| UNIX on 68K... originally done at MIT, available from LUCASFILM, (on a
| SUN MULTI-bus system), WICAT on their own 68K system, Microsoft
| (XENIX) on a QBUS 68K board--soon on other processors, Fortune on
| their own system (proprietary bus), plus a few more in progress...

Henry Spencer on 28th February 1983:

| To give credit where it is due: as far as I know, the first person to
| realize the Unix performance implications of shared disk servers (as
| opposed to the general usefulness of local disks for performance) was
| Tom Duff of Lucasfilm's computer graphics lab.  His prediction has
| been confirmed there, and they are now planning to put a local disk on
| each of their SUNs for exactly this reason.  Tom recently lost the
| local disk on his SUN temporarily, and says that the loss in
| performance is considerable.

mis at Berkeley on 18th April 1983:

| Title: Emacs on 68000's
| yes, we have it running here on suns and valids, and Valid/Lucasfilm
| Unix is similar enough to Unisoft.

-- 
Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org>                         <http://offog.org/>