10 May
2022
10 May
'22
11:18 p.m.
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.
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On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 12:59 PM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
PC/IX
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On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 11:32 AM Mary Ann Horton <mah(a)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> 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.
>>
>>
>>