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

Mary Ann Horton mah at mhorton.net
Wed May 11 01:28:21 AEST 2022


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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