[TUHS] Un-released/internal/special UNIX versions/ports during the years?

[Gregg Levine]

Hello!
We (well most of us) all of us know about AIX. Well what about AIX/370?
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."


On Sat, Feb 25, 2017 at 9:17 AM, Arno Griffioen <arno.griffioen at ieee.org> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Some of the stories on here reminded me of the fact that there's also likely
> a whole boat-load of UNIX ports/variants in the past that were never released
> to customers or outside certain companies.
>
> Not talking about UNIX versions that have become obsolete or which have
> vanished by now like IRIX or the original Apple A/UX (now *that* was an
> interesting oddball though..) and such, but the ones that either died or
> failed or got cancelled during the product development process or were never
> intended to be released to the outside ar all.
>
> Personally I came across one during some UNIX consultancy work at Commodore
> during the time that they were working on bringing out an SVR4 release for the
> Amiga (which they actually sold for some time)
>
> Side-note.. Interestingly enough according to my contacts at that time inside
> CBM it was based on the much cheaper to license 3B2 SVR4 codebase and not the
> M68k codebase which explained some of the oddities and lack of M68k ABI
> compliance of the Amiga SVR4 release..
>
> However..
>
> It turned out that they had been running an SVRIII port on much older Amiga
> 2000's with 68020 cards for some of their internal corporate networking and
> email, UUCP, etc. and was called 'AMIX' internally. But as far as I know it
> was never released to the public or external customers.
>
> It was a fairly 'plain jane' SVRIII port with little specific 'Amiga' hardware
> bits supported but otherwise quite complete and pretty stable.
>
> Worked quite well in the 4MB DRAM available on these cards. The later SVR4
> didn't fare so well.. Paged itself to death unless you had 8 or even (gasp!)
> 16MB.
>
> It was known 'outside' that something like this existed as the boot ROM's on
> the 68020 card had an 'AMIX' option but outside CBM few people really knew
> much about it.
>
> It may have been used at the University of Lowell as they developed a TI34010
> based card that may already have had some support in this release.
>
> Still..
>
> This does make me wonder.. Does anyone else know of these kinds of special
> 'snowflake' UNIX versions that never got out at various companies/insitutes?
> (and can talk about it without violating a whole stack of NDA's ;) )
>
> No special reason.. Just idle curiosity :)
>
> Likely all these are gone forever anyway as prototypes and small run production
> devices and related software tends to get destroyed when companies go bust or
> get aquired.
>
>                                                         Bye, Arno.