From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: mparson@bl.org (Michael Parson)
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2006 19:15:57 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] *nixs
In-Reply-To: <000701c66989$d8aa18e0$1901a8c0@myhome.westell.com>
References: <000701c66989$d8aa18e0$1901a8c0@myhome.westell.com>
Message-ID: <20060427001557.GA11978@bl.org>

On Wed, Apr 26, 2006 at 07:33:37PM -0400, Bill Cunningham wrote:
>     This xenix and venix OS thing. Where did these OSs come from? If minix
> and BSD are direct descendants of v4,5,6,7 where does linux fit in here?

Xenix was an early UNIX written for the Intel line of processors
originally by Microsoft and later sold off to the Santa Cruz
Organization (SCO).

BSD started off as extentions to the AT&T lines of UNIX, eventually
leading to a lawsuit in the early 90s and the 'Lite' distributions which
were finally free of AT&T code but also marked UCB's exit from the OS
market.

Minix shares no source-code with AT&T or BSD unixes, it was written from
the ground up by AST.

Linux shares no source code with AT&T, BSD, or Minix.  Linus Torvalds
started it as a way to learn i386 asssembly and multitasking.  He
started with Minix as his development platform, but used no code from
it.

This is HIGHLY simplified summary, if you want more in depth
information, a good read is 'A Quarter Centry of Unix' by Peter
H. Salus.  FreeBSD also has a good history file that gives a little
more information thatn I gave here..

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org