[TUHS] June 8, 2026 – Vivian Voss – Where Unix Runs Today

[Cameron Tyre via TUHS]

Hi Charlie,

My desktop, a Mac mini and my laptop, a secondhand Macbook Air, both run on it and it was the installation of Xcode on the desktop which also installed the command-line tools which then led me down the long and winding rabbit hole leading to the TUHS list for which I am always grateful to have discovered.

I always download a copy of the UNIX 03 certification for the latest macOS major release, from the Open Group website, and pin it on my office wall. It's some kind of completeness thing in my head, I guess. Only last week I got an email from Apple asking me to complete a survey about why I bought an Apple computer and other, scarier, questions like "Do I update it?"...! In one of my replies I said that I like to try and keep life simple and that I can click on Terminal, fire up ed, type out a document and then use lp to print it out and it doesn't get much simpler than that.

My wife has an iPhone and an iPad. I once tried to explain a condensed version of the UNIX story to her and that her phone and tablet were running UNIX underneath the colorful facades of iOS and iPadOS but I can't reproduce her reply on this list, or probably anywhere.

Best wishes,

Cameron



On Monday, 3 August 2026 at 17:25, Charles H Sauer (he/him) via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> I discovered https://vivianvoss.net/blog/where-unix-runs-today yesterday
> and sent the excerpts below to former AIX colleagues and others that
> might be interested. I forwarded that mail to Clem and Heinz this
> morning. Clem replied with a detailed commentary. Clem seemed to agree
> this might be worth posting here to liven things up.
> 
> Charlie
> 
> ''Open the laptop in front of you. If it is a Mac, you are on certified
> Unix. Hand it to the child next to you, watching cartoons on an iPad —
> also Darwin underneath, the same family. The phone in your pocket: same.
> Walk through any data centre serving European video, and a sizeable
> share of those streams come off appliances running FreeBSD. Pick up a
> games console at the till in any electronics shop, and odds are very
> good it boots a fork of FreeBSD before it ever shows you a menu.
> ...
> ''One footnote worth keeping. Apple is certified on UNIX 03, dating from
> 2002. Only one product on the planet is certified at the next level —
> UNIX V7 (Single UNIX Specification version 4, POSIX.1-2008): IBM’s AIX 7.
> ...
> ''The world’s commercial Unix systems are not all in retirement homes.
> 
> ''IBM AIX is actively developed. New versions track new IBM POWER
> processors; the public roadmap is clear. AIX 7 is the only operating
> system in the world certified at UNIX V7 (SUSv4) level. Banks,
> insurance, large enterprise back-office: AIX still carries this work,
> and IBM still treats it as core strategy.''