recent history of Unix evolution

[Simon Patience]

Submitted-by: sp at gregoire.osf.fr (Simon Patience)

In article <17405 at cs.utexas.edu>, Kevin.N.Broekhoven at QueensU.CA writes:
> 2.Similarly, OSF/1 is "currently under development" but is having some
problems
>     getting off the ground.  I believe IBM has pulled out of the effort to
>     develop the operating system, in favour of AIX which works.  What are the
>     dates of:    1.the formation of OSF
>                  2.the development phase of the OSF/1 operating system
>                    (is it still under development, or  has it been abandoned
>                      completely after the pull out by Big Blue?)
>     What are the Unix roots of the OSF/1 operating system?  i.e. was it
>     developed from System V.2, or Mach from Carnegie Mellon U?

OSF/1 1.0 was released for general distribution on December 7 1990.
There are no problems that I know of that has prevented it getting off
the ground and I was one of the development team. In fact the project
slipped only 2 or 3 weeks from its original ship date which is pretty
impressive for a project of that magnitude I think.

At the general release announcement the sponsors endorsed OSF/1 and many
(including IBM) announced that they would be using OSF/1 as part of
their operating system technology. The final IBM product could well be
called AIX but that is their perogative and a marketing decision I would think.

To question 1, OSF, the company, was formed in May 1988. As I said,
OSF/1 has already shipped and your information about IBM is incorrect.

OSF/1, simplistically, is the integration of Mach 2.5 microkernel and
BSD 4.4 but there has been a significant contribution of technology from
various sources, IBM, Mentat, Secureware, Encore, to name a few (I
apologise to those I have ommited), and of course OSFs own development
group. There is a small amount of AT&T System V.2 code in the kernel but
not much and it is well isolated.

> 4.Is there a competition between System V.4 and OSF/1, in the sense that one
>     will be chosen as the ANSI standard Unix, or are they both sufficiently
>     conformant to current ANSI/POSIX standards, that this is not an issue:
>     that the competition is strictly in the marketplace?

As far as I am concerned there is no competition. Both systems support
the standard interfaces (POSIX, FIPS, XPG3, ANSI-C, etc) so with respect
to strictly conforming application portability the two systems should be
identical. Obviously there are other differences, for example in the
area of multiprocessor support, threads, dynamic configuration, etc but
I will stick my neck out and guess that neither system will be "chosen"
by any standards body as the one and only true system.

The current status is that OSF/1 1.1 is already under development and
likely to be available sometime in the next 12 months or so, I don't
know the exact ship date. The system today has already been ported to
more that 8 different architectures, including a MIPS R2000, National
Semi 32532, Motorola 68030, Intel 80386 and I860, Fairchild clipper and
more, I forget them all. 

DISCLAIMER: This is not an official statement from OSF.

  Simon Patience
  Open Software Foundation			Phone: +33-76-63-48-72
  Research Institute				FAX:   +33-76-51-05-32
  2 Avenue De Vignate				Email: sp at gr.osf.org
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Volume-Number: Volume 22, Number 103