Another BIG Mainframe Bites the Dust

re:

the future system project was going to have lots of stuff like that (as well as gobs of other stuff) ... and would have replaced 360 (and early 370).

however as repeatedly noted ... FS was canceled (excessively ambitious?) and there was a lot of effort pushed into getting 370 activities moving again. recent post in another thread with various other detail

i've frequently commented that the FS example contributed significantly to the 801-risc philosiphy ... to do the exact opposite (of what was attempted in FS). much of the 801-risc effort was whenever there might be hardware-software trade-off ... you could make perfect software that would do it better than hardware (allowing the hardware to be made much simpler). cp.r operating system and pl.8 compiler were to provide the basis for that philosiphy.

one such simplification was that there was no hardware protection domains (i.e. supervisor-problem state differentiation). pl.8 compiler would generate perfect software ... and cp.r operating system would guarantee that only correctly compiled pl.8 code would be loaded for end.

this resulted in a little hiccup. ROMP (16bit 801-risc) was targeted as an austin GSD effort for displaywriter follow-on (implemented on cp.r with pl.8). it was canceled in the early 80s and there was activity looking around to salvage the effort ... and observed that lots of hardware platforms were being shipped with minimal extra effort by leveraging a port of the unix operating system.

a desicion to retarget ROMP to unix workstation market forced retrofitting bits & pieces to ROMP to try and compensate for not having an enhanced perfect software environment ... but having to rely on the UNIX-C operational paradigm (like needing hardware privilege-non-privilege end states).

the company that had been hired to do the AT&T unix port of PC-IX ... was then hired to do a similar AT&T unix port to ROMP. This was announced as AIX (and PC-RT).