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

[Mary Ann Horton <mah@mhorton.net>]

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It must have been PC/IX, that rings a bell. I also had Xenix in the same 
time frame, it was different (and I preferred Xenix).

     Thanks!

         Mary Ann

On 5/10/22 09:08, Warner Losh wrote:
>
>
> 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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