OSF/1, DE, IBM, and Tektronix

D. Peschel said... | |What _I_ want to know is the relationship between OSF/1, a.k.a. Digital |UNIX, and AIX. The manual entry for stanza(4) on our DEC system is the same |as OSF/1 1.0, and it's SO badly written that only IBM could have done it. |Plus stanzas are an IBM-ism anyway. I bet the entry is pretty much the same |on AIX systems, too. (I just checked and our AIX doesn't have it. So I |don't know -- it's just a guess.) DEC first seriously attacked the UNIX market with Ultrix, which was almost a pure BSD port. Over time they added a bunch of stuff to it. They had a few really cool things, like they dxdiff, easily the best GUI-based diff I've used. Then along came OSF, a hodgepodge of UNIX vendors scared of the idea of Sun and AT&T getting together and taking over the world. So they put together OSF/1. This included people from a whole mess of computer vendors, but DEC and IBM wre probably the biggest contributors. The reference platform was a DECStation ?000 (I forget which one). By the time OSF/1 actually came out, it was obvious that it was a fair example of design by committee, and the AT&T/Sun alliance had pretty well faded away. So DEC, for who knows what reason, oter than that they had the goods, decided to swap Ultrix out and OSF/1 in. And everyone else went back to whatever they had been doing before - AIX, HP/UX, whatever. OSF actually did some cool stuff, but they had some real problems, too. I was working at SecureWare, who was doing the security stuff for OSF/1, and I remember new sandbox drops every day, and bugs that had been fixed reappearing over and over in their original form, and just general mayhem. My favorite part, though, was when we built the kernel and X11 fully debugged, to track down a really nasty problem. Just booting the OS ate up 70 or 80 MB of the 128MB in our DECStation, and adding X11 on the hi-res screen ate up the rest of the RAM and a fair bit of swap space. Then I tried to log in, which took almost an hour exactly, beating the snot out of the disk drive, until it finally came up - having used over 100MB of swap space. Starting a Motif app ate the rest of our 256MB of swap space over the course of two hours or so, at which time the system just rolled over and stuck its little feet up in the air. We never found the bug. Three or four builds later, it was gone, somehow. Nobody at OSF knew where it came from, where it went, or why. Oh, well. My desktop machine at the time was the last of the Tektronix 68K-based systems running a BSD variant. It was slower than their ill-fated 88K systems, but those ran SVR4, and mine was fast enoug for me. It was a spiffy machine for the time. Of course, I was just glad I wasn't running A/UX on really slow Apples like most of my co-workers! -Miles