Splinter Unix?

[Chuck Karish]

In article <8161 at dhw68k.cts.com> david at dhw68k.cts.com (David H. Wolfskill)
writes:
>IBM has (at various times) made different (incompatible, to various
>degrees) flavors of UNIX available on several of the machines it
>makes.  Indeed: in spite of the (fairly) recent announcement from IBM to
>the effect that AIX was to be the standard IBM port of UNIX, there is a
>product (available only to the academic community, to the best of my
>knowledge) called "IBM/4.3" that is (you guessed it) a port of 4.3BSD.

The ports of 4.2 and 4.3 to RTs are essentially vanilla Berkeley
UNIX, not IBM products.  They were distributed to encourage
development for the RT platform, and to get IBM involved in UNIX
research in the universities.  IBM donated the machines (RTs)
for that research.

I suspect that 4.2A and IBM/4.3 were not released to the world outside
the universities specifically to AVOID presenting two incompatible
products to their customers.

Is it any less valid for IBM to maintain a distinct internal version
of UNIX than it is for AT&T to use Version 9 while they distribute
System V?

Chuck Karish	ARPA:	karish at denali.stanford.edu
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