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Message Posted: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 @ 19:32:59 GMT

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NCR UNIX MP-RAS has it's start in the old NCR minicomputer days NCR started to build UNIX systems starting in 1982 (Tower 16/32), and licensed various UNIX flavors.

NCR Licensed AT&T UNIX SVR4 (AT&T owned UNIX in those days) in 1989 and modified it for their use.

NCR added code to enhance reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS), and multiprocessing (MP) to SVR4.0, and that's why it's called UNIX MP-RAS. It was one of the first UNIX multiprocessor OSs.

NCR UNIX MP-RAS was used in small to medium Unix servers that NCR used to sell. You could get a Unix server, with MP-RAS and Oracle to run your business on from NCR. You could add TopEnd (transaction monitor) and/or LifeKeeper (clustering) software from NCR.

The copy they licensed was SVR4.0, which pre-dated lightweight processes/kernel threads, which were added in SVR4.2, if I remember (SVR4.2 had many major enhancements). SVR4.2 came out in 1992 or so (the last from AT&T), with SVR4.2MP in 1993, at which point AT&T had already sold USL and the rights to UNIX to Novell.

NCR never used SVR4.2, deciding it was too much work to try to merge their MP-RAS changes with SVR4.2.

When AT&T Bought NCR, and renamed NCR "AT&T Global Information Solutions", there was a time when MP-RAS was called "AT&T/GIS UNIX MP- RAS".

Teradata and NCR were merged in the 1992/1993 timeframe, if I remember right.

By the time Teradata was working with NCR UNIX MP-RAS, I think it was already up to version 3?

To make Teradata (originally designed for a custom Teradata OS) run on MP-RAS, the Teradata developers wrote extension code on top of MP- RAS to give it the features they needed and the compatibility with the old Teradata OS they needed, and called those extensions PDE.

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