Re: [TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?

[Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>]

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On Tue, May 10, 2022, 9:32 AM Mary Ann Horton <mah@mhorton.net> wrote:

> I recall having an IBM PC port of UNIX in the 1980s on floppy with a black
> 6x9 box and Charlie Chaplin with the red rose. I thought it was called AIX.
> I installed it, and recall it being very different from UNIX for sysadmin
> (different logs, different admin commands) but similar for users. I thought
> it was based on System III or thereabouts.
>
> I can't find any evidence of this. It appears AIX 1.0 wasn't for the
> original PC.
>
> Does anyone else recall this distribution and what it was called or based
> on?
>

The first 8086 port was inside of Bell Labs, but was for a system with a
custom MMU. The first commercial one was Venix released in 1983 based on
Version 7 with some Berkeley improvements using the MIT compilers of the
time, but it had a blue label with a boring stylized V on it. IBM released
PC/IX a year later (1984) and marketed heavily. It was a companion to its
other unix offerings, and wasn't AIX. That port was based on System III. If
anything had the clever Charlie Chaplin marketing materials, it was sure to
be PC/IX. Microsoft's Xenix was also in this time frame, but wasn't
marketed by IBM (and its earliest version in 1982 predate Venix, but were
only for Intel's System 86 machines, and may have required an Intel MMU
board (the quick research I did was unclear on this point, other than it
was supported). SCO/Microsoft released in late 1983 and early 1984 versions
for the commercially available PC and other variants at the time before the
IBM-PC became the standardized x86 platform.

So my money is on PC/IX.

Warner

Thanks,
>
>     Mary Ann
> On 5/1/22 19:08, Kenneth Goodwin wrote:
>
> My understanding of AIX was that IBM licensed the System V source code and
> then proceeded to "make it their own". I had a days experience with it on a
> POS cash register fixing a client issue. The shocker - they changed all the
> error messages to error codes with a look at the manual requirement.
>
> Not sure if this is true in its entirety or not.
> But that's what I recall, thst it was not a from scratch rewrite but more
> along the lines of other vendor UNIX clones of the time.
> License the source, change the name and then beat it to death.
>
> On Sun, May 1, 2022, 2:08 PM ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> in terms of rewrites from manuals, while it was not the first, as I
>> understand it, AIX was an example of "read the manual, write the
>> code."
>>
>> Unlike Coherent, it had lots of cases of things not done quite right.
>> One standout in my mind was mkdir -p, which would return an error if
>> the full path existed. oops.
>>
>> But it was pointed out to me that Condor had all kinds of code to
>> handle AIX being different from just about everything else.
>>
>>
>>

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