Interdata 8/32

The Interdata 7/32 and Interdata 8/32 were IBM System/360 compatible mainframe/mini machines; they differed in character sets, architecture and of course machine code.

Oddly enough, real information about the 8/32 is near nonexistent, short of the SIMH simulator.

UNIX

They were the one of the first non-DEC machines to run UNIX. Amazingly, the ports to the 7/32 and 8/32 were done roughly simultaneously, by two separate organizations.

According to Richard Miller, "The First Unix Port", the first port began in 1976, at Wollongong, on an Interdata 7/32, 192k-core/2x5Mb disk drives.

In April 28, 1977, Unix Version 6 was booting. When Bell Labs was contacted:

In fact there was a surprise on both sides: a team at Bell Labs was in the midst of doing their own port of UNIX to an Interdata 8/32 (a slightly more powerful 32-bit mini-computer). They had begun work at the beginning of 1977 in anticipation of the delivery of their machine in April and had a kernel working by June less than two months after the Wollongong kernel first ran on the bare 7/32.

The Interdata 7/32 and 8/32 were the first 32-bit machines to both run Unix Version 6; the Interdata 8/32 port became the basis for UNIX 7th Edition.

External links

Interdata 7/32 and Interdata

• Interdata Reference Manual 29-004R02 7/32
• Interdata - Wikipedia

Unix Port

• The First Unix Port; Miller, R.
• The First port of Unix; Reinfelds, J.
• Portability of C Programs and the UNIX System; Johnson, S.C. Ritchie, D. M.