[TUHS] Government-Issue UNIX?

[Dan Cross via TUHS]

On Thu, Oct 9, 2025 at 7:50 PM Clem Cole via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> You asked: * "**if there was ever an attempt by the U.S. or another
> government to license with AT&T to create a government-issued version of
> UNIX."  *

The responses to this question thus far have mostly related to
military and other secure applications, and less to general computing
use throughout the rest of the government. In either case, I think
Clem has it right; the implication is that the government mostly
publishes standards and relies on vendors and contractors to implement
those standards; thus, no GI Unix distribution, just a specification.
If anything, Microsoft Windows is probably the closest anything has
ever come to a standard government OS.

At one point, the US Marine Corps had standardized on Banyan VINES for
a bunch of networking functions across the FMF. I wasn't in at the
time, but my brother, who was a grunt-turned-Cobra-pilot and couldn't
care less, told me when they started to transition away from it (this
would have been early- or mid-1990s) and showed me a draft that was
being circulated in his squadron about the upcoming infrastructure
changes: because a bunch of young helo pilots must have been really,
really interested :-). Anyway, written by non-experts, it overloaded a
lot of computing acronyms in ways that only the military was capable
of making so confusing. He wasn't nearly as amused as I was at that,
or for that matter, amused at all; particularly given that I was so
amused. A few years later, I was talking with a Warrant Officer who
remembered working on VINES, but by then all that stuff had been
replaced by Windows on Dell PCs/servers and Cisco networking gear.

        - Dan C.

>    Taking your question in a different direction than some of the
> other responses, where do you see FIPS-151 fit in relation?  For many
> years, the FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) was a formal
> requirement if a system was to be sold to the USG.  In fact, NIST(part of
> the US Dept of Commerce) wrote a test suite to check to see if an OS
> conformed to FIPS-151 [it's described here:
> https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/FIPS/fipspub151-2-1993.pdf — and
> today the suite is referred to as VSX-PCS].  The Open Group now maintains
> those test suites, which anyone can download if they like:
> https://posix.opengroup.org/testsuites.html. Note, they released updates to
> 6 of them in 2025.
>
>   I would say that was a pretty strong statement that, while the US Gov,
> was not directly creating a UNIX implementation, they were making sure that
> the vendors supplied one.
>
> Clem