[GnarfGnarf]

I worked for Sperry Univac 1974-79, in Halifax, Montreal and Calgary. I was an "SA", Systems Analyst at the service of the Sales team. It was a lot of fun. The Univac salesmen were the cowboys that didn't fit in at IBM. When preparing benchmarks, money was no object, we had lavish expense accounts. In the Oil Patch I saw $100K deals signed during coffee break.

One of Univac's problems was the proliferation of operating systems for the different incompatible architectures. There was Exec 8 for the premier 1100 series (36-bit); OS/4, OS/3, OS/7 and later VS/9 (formerly RCA's TSOS then VMOS) for the 9000 series (32-bit); also the 418 and 494 real-time OS'es (18-bit words). Then there was the CADE 1900. All written in Assembler of course. We even had Varian in the branch, with salesmen from the different product lines competing for business.

All this duplication resulted in overhead and squandering of programmer resources.

After the Burroughs merger, the joke was that UNISYS stood for "Univac is Still Your Supplier".

[Animats]

I spent seven years doing maintenance programming for EXEC 8, the operating system kernel for the UNIVAC 1108. It was first demoed in 1967, and was way ahead of its time. By about 1972, it was running reasonably well. This OS had threads, symmetrical multiprocessing, and async I/O. Written entirely in assembler, it was not fun to work on. When it crashed, a dump was taken to drum, and the dump was then printed, producing a stack of paper about two inches thick, mostly just pages of octal numbers. Analysis involves pencils and colored highlighters, tracking pointers through memory.

Here's the manual.[1]

Amazingly, the descendant of EXEC 8, OS/2200, is still a maintained product, over half a century later.[2] There's even a roadmap out to 2033.

[1] https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_univac1100tiveReferenc...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_2200

[rbanffy]

I was curious about what OS/2200 was in the Unisys lineup. It didn’t fit with MCP and what I understood about it. At some point you could download en emulator that ran on Windows.

It seemed even more user-hostile than MCP.

[AnimalMuppet]

Ah, the 418! That's something I haven't heard about in a while.

My dad worked for Sperry Univac. He had a laminated list of 418 assembler instructions, with assembler mnemonics, and time of execution. I seem to recall 4 microseconds for addition and 6 for multiplication, but it's been a while since I saw it...

[earleybird]

I worked for the minicomputer division(may be using the wrong term - it was a long time ago) from 80-83 as an pre & post sales support - likely equivalent to the "SA" on the mainframe side. Within a week of starting they sent me off to Irvine CA for a two week course on the OS internals. Somewhere I believe I have a book that is a printout of OS source. (all V77 assembler).

I have some great memories - first time seeing whales just off Newport Beach stands out.