IBM Plugs Big Iron to the College Crowd 756

ref:

note in the early 80s, ibm had formed "ACIS" ... which was told to hire a couple people to give away $lovem to universities.

out of that ... IBM (equally with DEC) funded project athena to the tune of $25m (matched by $25m from dec). out of that you got

cmu got $50m ... out of that came mach, camelot, andrew filesystem, andrew widgets, etc. mach was used by convex for exampler numa machine ... recent mention: mach was also used for NeXT machine and is the basis for current apple operating system.

acis group also started doing a port of bsd to 370. along the way that was retargeted to pc-rt and named "AOS". this caused a little heartburn for the AIX group in austin ... since they had claimed that something like 120 people were needed to program the VRM in PL.8 as an abstract machine layer for speeding up and simplifying the porting (AT&T) unix to the pc-rt (acis group doing the bsd port to bare hardware faster and less resources).

The acis group also redid JFS filesystem so that it didn't use the special 6000 hardware. The austin AIX group claimed the special 6000 hardware was required to make JFS perform ... ACIS showed JFS w-o the special hardware outperforming JFS using the special hardware.

ACIS also did the work that took UCLS locus and produced AIX-370 and AIX-PS2.

a few other past posts mentioning acis:

--