Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

Rob Landley
2001-06-24T21:57:40Z

On Saturday 23 June 2001 20:49, John Adams wrote:
> On Saturday 23 June 2001 10:07, Rob Landley wrote:
> > Here's what I'm looking for:
> >
> > AIX was first introduced for the IBM RT/PC in 1986, which came out of the
> > early RISC research. It was ported to PS/2 and S/370 by SAA, and was
> > based on unix SVR2. (The book didn't specify whether the original
> > version or the version ported to SAA was based on SVR2, I'm guessing both
> > were.)
>
> You are partially correct. AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) was built
> by the Boston office of Interactive Systems under contract to IBM. We had
> a maximum of 17 people in the effort which shipped on the RT in January
> 1986.

Ah. I got the above out of a book in the UT library. (I have the name
written down in my notebook... Um, possibly "IBM PS/2, a business
perspective" by Jim Hoskins, or more likely "IBM RISC 6000, a business
perspective" also by Jim Hoskins. I have no idea who Jim Hoskins is.)

Obviously It's better to have somebody who was actually there. Mind if I bug
you offline about this? (Or better yet, convince you to join the mailing
list I'll be creating this afternoon...)

> Prior to that time, Interactive Systems had produced a port of System III
> running on the PC/XT called PC/IX which was sold via IBM. I used PC/IX to
> produce the software only floating point code in the first version of AIX.

Cool. I know there were several nebulous versions of unix available for the
PC. (I don't know when coherent was introduced but it was around in 89...
And Xenix was always sort of floating around... Considering that IBM also
had access to Xenix (if it wanted it), that's at least three versions of Unix
IBM could have put on the PC.

What do you want to bet no two of them ran the same binaries? :)

> johna

Rob