The Roots of UNIX for the IBM Mainframe (part 1)

When I was a freshman at Princeton University in the 1974-75 school year the computer center hosted, for the state of New Jersey educational system, an IBM System/370 Model 158 running the marvelously interactive APL\360 system.

It shared a room with Princeton’s System/360 Model 91 which was an amazing beast but only ran batch jobs. The APL system was the main time sharing computer on campus at the time, but only a privileged few of us students had access to it.

Over in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department (E-Quad room B-217) there was a Digital PDP-11/45 computer which had just been converted from a Digital operating system to running UNIX Version 6.  It had a rabid and growing fan base, including myself.

For whatever reason, late in the 74/75 year it was announced that Princeton and the state of New Jersey were ending the “hosting” relationship.  The Computer Center folks began to look for a replacement, and enhancement, because they understood it was past time to invest more heavily in time-sharing.  The rabid UNIX fans, of course, pushed hard for the idea of getting a large PDP-11/70, running UNIX, to be the base of the new service.

Princeton’s default plan was to acquire a 370/145 for their own time-sharing, because it was all they could afford. However,  when IBM got wind of the possibility of a non-IBM solution they gave Princeton an offer they couldn’t refuse – a very cheap 370/158. In fact, it was the same 370/158 that was already installed!  NJ had been leasing it from IBM, so IBM could do with it as they pleased.  IBM sold it to Princeton at a very attractive discount, and it was only a few days between the end of the NJ service and the beginning of Princeton’s. Princeton decided to run VM/370 – IBM’s Virtual Machine operating system, which was, along with the included CMS monitor, a fairly decent time-sharing system (for the day).

The UNIX fans were, of course, bummed out about the decision.  Somehow in discussing this turn of events, I (the foolish freshman) made the observation that since the IBM could run virtual machines with various operating systems, and UNIX was written in a C – a high level language (for the day), then we could get what we wanted just by porting UNIX to the mainframe.  The more experienced upperclassmen were quick to explain that it couldn’t really be that easy.  The idea faded away.

However, in the summer of ’75 Eric Schmidt (yes, that Eric Schmidt) landed an internship working with the UNIX guys at Bell Labs (Center 127 – Computing Science Research) where he worked closely with Mike Lesk writing lex, a lexical analyzer generator. At the same time though, he learned that there was a C compiler for the IBM 360 family that had been developed at Bell Labs. I don’t know who wrote it, or its derivation, but as seen in the letter Mike Lesk had something to do with it.

So in August of ’75 I was back home in El Paso when I got a call out of the blue from Eric – Was I serious about wanting to port UNIX to the 370?  I said sure, and Eric organized a project with myself, Joseph Skudlarek, and Peter Eichenberger to work on the project as an independent study project – under the supervision of Prof. Bruce Arden, chair of the EECS department and a wonderful person.

Eric, in a display of his future managerial potential, did not participate in the actual technical work, but deserves a lot of credit for working the system to make things possible. In part 2, I’ll talk about how the project went and the hurdles we faced.