I mostly defer to Heinz and Clem regarding PC/IX. It is hard to imagine
the IBM people in Boca Raton allowing the Chaplin imagery to be used
with a secondary product like PC/IX, but I don't remember the packaging.
PC/IX was my first hands on experience with Unix. PC/IX was used
extensively in the AIX development group while ROMP hardware was scarce.
Before I got my own RT/PC, I used PC/IX primarily, until I got a PC/AT
and started using some instance of Xenix that supported the 286 MMU.
Charlie
On 5/10/2022 12:18 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
Sorry, I hit return too soon.
Mary Ann - I think PC/IX is what you were thinking. FWIW: it was one
of the reasons why Andy developed Minix. He said at the time it was
insufficient and if he was going to have a pure V7 port for the base
8088-based PC/XT (not 286s-based PC/AT) then he wanted something he
could teach with. IIRC the early PC/IX (and I know for certain Minux
did not) did not even recognize the MMU for the 286 of the AT (much less
the later 386), but it did have a driver for the AT disk controller
(which was/is a different controller than the XT).
As Warner says, PC/XT was based on the new System III license we had
just all negotiated earlier that winter. Microsoft had already started
shipping Xenix on the x86/68000 and I think a z8000 using the V7
license, but I don't think IBM relicensed it. HP was shipping HP-UX
for the original 9000 on the same, and Tek was also shipping it firsts
emulator system on the V7 license. DEC had the original v7m which
begat Ultrix, although I don't remember if DEC ever shipped binaries on
the original V7 license. Charlie can correct me, but I don't think IBM
ever shipped binaries on the V7 license either.
[The original V7 redistribution license had terms that makers of $100K+
systems did not mind too much, but was difficult for what would
eventually be called PCs and workstations at the <$10K (much less < $1K)
price to swallow.
FWIW: Years later, Linus famously got his 386 box from his parents for
Christmas, got a copy of Andy's Minux (for a PC/XT), started writing his
terminal program, and was annoyed that it did not use the VM/larger
address space of hardware.
ᐧ
ᐧ
On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 12:59 PM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com
<mailto:clemc@ccc.com>> wrote:
PC/IX
ᐧ
On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 11:32 AM Mary Ann Horton <mah(a)mhorton.net
<mailto: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?
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(a)gmail.com
> <mailto: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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