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

[Clem Cole]

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 at ccc.com> wrote:

> PC/IX
> ᐧ
>
> On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 11:32 AM Mary Ann Horton <mah at 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 at 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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