Jolitz HeritageJolitz Heritage Site - Chronicling the Legacies of the Jolitz Family of Silicon Valley, including the accomplishments of William Jolitz, Lynne Jolitz, Rebecca Jolitz, Ben Jolitz, and William Leonard Jolitz. [ Jolitz Heritage ] |
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The Symmetrix Manual for the 375
Lynne speaks - "The Symmetric 375 was a very
unique computer. Based on the NS32000 microprocessor,
it was a portable no wait state computer with virtual memory, hardware floating point, large processor
main memory, and ethernet. Unlike PCs, it supported 4 users easily with a host of compilers,
debuggers, tools and utilities, and applications. It ran a custom version of
Berkeley Unix (4.1BSD, 4.2BSD, 4.3BSD) called Symmetrix. Later versions offered a configurable kernel
software package for device drivers and SCSI support. Much of this work influenced work later done
in 386BSD. I wrote the "The Symmetric 375 and Symmetrix Owner's Manual" for it.
One of the most interesting aspects of this manual was that it did not follow the typical "Unix Man command" style. Instead of offering a printed command manual with some hardware pages as was the common approach, the 375 came with an online man function (early UNIX boxes often didn't do this to preserve disk space).
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