[TUHS] one element of one of M factions of N companies [Re: Amdahl UTS, AIX/370, AIX/ESA

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

On Tue, Nov 05, 2019 at 04:11:11PM -0600, Charles H Sauer wrote:
> It has been illuminating, surprising, but not shocking, the last week of so,
> to learn from from posts here, that AIX/370 was hard to get and mostly a
> university offering. What we (AIX people associated with RT/PC and then
> RS/6000) were told was that "everybody", especially Federal customers,
> wanted what became known as TCF (the original Locus work) for 370 and PS/2.
> I remember one Federal Systems Division person who seemed especially
> effective as a Locus advocate. I'd always assumed AIX/370 and AIX PS/2
> became more available than reported here, but I left IBM before they were
> released.
>
> Enumerating factions/companies, just regarding AIX & Unix, there were the
> Federal Systems faction/company, the academic factions/company (primarily
> two factions, BSD & TCF, in Palo Alto), the PS/2 faction/company, the
> Rochester System/38->AS/400 faction/company, the Austin development lab,
> several Research locations (primarily Yorktown), ...
> 

There was also AOS (Academic Operating System) which was basically
repackaged BSD 4.x ported to the IBM/RT PC[1].  At MIT's Project
Athena, most people massively preferred it to AIX, but we were force
marched to AIX by 1987 or 1988.  :-/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RT_PC#Software

				- Ted