[TUHS] Other POSIX Candidates?

[arnold at skeeve.com]

segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> Another way to put it would be as a chicken and egg, which came first, ...
> ..., or the ongoing need for UNIX standardization finding sponsorship
> by the working groups, IEEE, etc.?

This.

Try to understand what things were like at the time. There were
a ton of competing Unix systems, all different:

- IBM: AIX on the mainframe and PS/2, which were different from
  AIX on the RT/PC and later RS/6000 (workstations).

- DEC: Ultrix on minicomputers and microvaxen, and later on MIPS
  based workstations

- Data General: DG/UX on their minicomputers.

- Pyramid: A BSD/System V hybrid RISC minicomputer

- Sun: Workstations, 680x0 based and later SPARC based, and servers.
  Initially BSD based, later SVR4 based.

- Workstations from HP, Tektronix, NBI, others I've probably forgotten,
  3B2 and 3B1/Unix PC from AT&T... The list goes on and on and on.

Things split roughly along BSD/System V lines, but code wasn't portable.
Did you use bcopy() or memcpy()? index() or strchr()? There was lots
of mixing and matching happening, too.

There was a crying need for a standard. The mess is what begot GNU
Autoconf, which made a difference at the time. Having the ANSI C standard
also helped.

HTH,

Arnold