Fujitsu BS2000 Operating System Manuals | Hacker News Reader

Fujitsu BS2000 Operating System Manuals

bs2manuals.ts.fujitsu.com

The BS2000 series is fascinating since Fujitsu-Siemens made the transition from S370-compatible hardware over MIPS- (Siemens also produced a series of MIPS-based workstations in the 1990s) and SPARC-based systems (based on Fujitsu SPARC silicon) to x86-64 today, staying binary compatible (using emulation/binary translation) all the way.

Siemens used to make lots of computing hardware like RF modems, MIPS processors, DRAM, even their own custom design CPU architecture (Tri-Core) for use in automotive and such.

Some of them still live on today in various spin-offs like Tri-Core is now part of Infineon, DRAM used to be Qimonda which went under and part of the RF modem division is now Apple.

They even made one of the few Windows NT on MIPS workstations. The RM 300 could run either SINIX (a Unix variant) or Windows NT/MIPS.

http://www.katalog.iser.fau.de/index.php?ort_id=322&inventar...

and Linux (https://www.linuxsecrets.com/linux-mips-wiki/RM_200.html).

SINIX and Linux used the R4000 in big endian mode, whereas NT was running in little endian. You had to flash a different firmware to switch between the systems...

I had swiss made EDO-Ram with insane(low) latencies from Siemens. Sixteen MEGABYTES of it! Looooong before Quimonda ;-)

You know? I had to work with the Siemens Mipsen(RM400/600 with Sinix/Reliant Unix) for some time. They were built like a tank, with massive cases, and usually almost silent because of that.

Thinking about that now, they could have been featured in some post-apocalyptic game like Fallout, or similar :-)

Anyways, the mainboard was from Silicon Graphics(said so on the board, made me smile at the time), and they had a different firmware/bootloader and usually lacked the graphics option, apart from a simple framebuffer.

Siemens also sold relabeled R3000/R4000 Indigos (RW3xx/4xx), we had a number of these donated to our student Unix workgroup by a local company back in the 90s. These machines ran IRIX instead of SINIX, of course.

Initial release 1975; 46 years ago Latest release 11.0 / 2017; 4 years ago

So we’re already up to version 11.0, whilst FB Messenger for example is at 313.0

German structured approach versus unicorn release management.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BS2000

BS = Betriebssystem = operating system, ie not what you might think it means ;)

Except in this case it stands for Business Server ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BS2000

I'd like to believe that (though Business Server doesn't even have the excuse of being in German language) but I can't find anything about that term on the linked Wikipedia page.

Check the BS2000 logo in the top right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BS2000#/media/File:BS2000.png

It's extremely unlikely that Siemens used a name like "Business Server" in the 70s.

My guess would be that it originally did mean "Betriebssystem", and the "Business Server" was coined a lot later for the non-German-speaking part of the world.

And have a look at [1], if you compare "PBS" (Platte Betriebssystem) to "BS 1000", both running on a 4004-45, it would be really really strange if this "BS" meant "Business Server" in 1968.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Siemens-Computer

It never occurred to me that BS would mean anything other than Betriebssystem considering the naming scheme of main competitor IBM (OS/390, OS/400) but that logo I didn't notice tells otherwise, so TIL. Still, the logo looks bland and generic, the kind of which a developer would use for his home project, so I'm still not 100% convinced ;)

I often have the same problem with POS = point of sale. Another term often comes to mind.

But "Our POS terminals are powered by Fujitsu's BS" is such a wonderful sentence...

Would make for some amusing troubleshooting videos: "So what do you do when having problems with your BS POS?"

That url contains an index with a very neat way of organising and curating the different sections of a mainframe/super computing operating system.

A big win would be getting Postgresql, Python and NodeJs ported. And midnight commander.

https://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/FUJITSU_Enterprise_Pos...

Cool, there it is!

It is super awesome to have briefs like this. Imagine having it for all major packages in Linux.

I guess it could be synthesized with fetches from Wikipedia.

I wish they had a hobbyist program.

Either Fujitsu or Hitachi's VOS3. Amdahl's OSes seem to have disappeared off the earth. There's just no good, legal mainframe OSes available for potential enthusiasts.

Unisys does have a hobbyist program:

MCP: https://www.unisys.com/offerings/clearpath-forward/clearpath...

OS 2200: https://www.unisys.com/offerings/clearpath-forward/clearpath...

8] Thank you!

Even if there isn't an official program, contact them and ask. If you reach the right person there's a good chance they will do what they can to help you out.

Which of these do we think are the most useful manuals today?

BS2000 is the result of corporate espionage. Fujitsu, Hitachi (VOS3) and even Japanese government officials were in on it. They stole the source code to IBM's MVS operating system. https://fas.org/irp/congress/1989_cr/h890712-japan.htm

If Japanese companies stole the source code, then why was BS2000 developed by Siemens (a German company) from 1970 on [1], with Siemens-Fujitsu taking only over in 2000, 11 years after the date in your link?

And yes, the BS2000 uses the /360 ISA, but so did a few other imitators of IBM. And copying an ISA is widespread, and not restricted to the /360.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BS2000

Thought the source code is not IP bounded and that is why we can run mvs older edition with the ibm emulator.

Software as busy is mainly bill gates idea. Control the hardware (like ps2 ...) you have the castle is the mentality of yesterday year. Or meter the punch card (the first anti-trust case against ibm?).

> Thought the source code is not IP bounded and that is why we can run mvs older edition with the ibm emulator.

In the beginning (1960s), IBM released their mainframe operating systems into the public domain. (At the time, US copyright law required an explicit copyright notice, and so IBM relinquished their copyright by publishing the software without any copyright notice attached.) So they were not copyrighted and anyone was free to use them, both then and today.

In the 1970s, IBM began to increasingly copyright add-on components, but left the core OS public domain. However, a lot of new features went into those copyrighted add-ons (MVS/SE, MVS/SP, ACF/TCAM, ACF/VTAM, TSO/E, SPF, etc), so if you just stuck to the public domain core OS you were running something a lot more limited than what you got with all of IBM's copyrighted add-ons.

Finally, starting in the 1980s, IBM started copyrighting the core OS as well. The big change was the introduction of MVS/XA in 1983 – MVS/XA supported 31-bit addressing (as opposed to the 24-bit addressing of previous versions). MVS/XA was fully copyrighted, both core and extensions.

So, yes, you can run old public domain OS versions legally, but not current versions. For example, the newest version of MVS you can run is MVS 3.8J at 8505 maintenance level. That has bug fixes through to 1985, but in terms of actual features is stuck somewhere in the early-to-mid 1970s. (The story for VM/CMS and DOS/360 is similar.)

You are confusing Fujtisu MSP with Fujitsu BS2000.

What you say is true of Fujtisu MSP. But there was never any stolen IBM code in BS2000. BS2000 was originally developed by RCA (as TSOS) without using any IBM code, and then Siemens purchased TSOS from RCA–and used it as the basis for BS2000–and then Siemens in turn sold BS2000 to Fujitsu.

Fujitsu had motivation to steal IBM code for MSP since MSP was trying to be MVS-compatible. RCA/Siemens/Fujitsu never had the same motivation for BS2000 since BS2000 was never aimed at MVS compatibility.

Eek! I misremembered!

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