3 Sep
2007
3 Sep
'07
10:36 p.m.
On 03/09/07, Doc Shipley <doc at mdrconsult.com> wrote:
Patrick Finnegan wrote:
I remember IBM proudly proclaiming, around the time of AIX 3, that
"we've taken Unix and added 3 million lines of code to it". IBM fans
looked interested; Unix fans looked faintly sick.
But I have a tiny bit of exposure to AIX. It is a Unix, all right,
And, AIX, well, if you've ever tried to admin
an AIX box, I don't see
how you could say it wasn't "unique" especially among UNIX variants.
AIX is Not Unix. Not any more than OS X is Unix.
I realize that AIX (and OS X 10.5) *is* UNIX, certified and
trademarked, but trying to approach it as one would a traditional unix
(HP/UX, Solaris, etc) is a recipe for heartbreak.
It's an extremely robust operating system with a very nice POSIX API.
Under the covers, it's its very own thing. from my experience. It's got lots of extensions, it
has SMIT and
things, but it's more like Unix than, say, QNX or BeOS or
something,
OSs which also have a bash (or sh-like) shell and POSIX. AIX is real
Unix underneath: I think it was an AT&T kernel originally, it's got
the classic filesystem layout, etc. etc.
Mac OS X is if anything more unlike classic Unix in the canonical
sense - it's Mach with a honking great kernel-space Unix layer taken
from FreeBSD.
I'd say there are 3 or 4 families of "Unix":
- direct lineal descendants: Solaris, SCO OpenServer, HP/UX, AIX
(and the whole BSD-Lite branch is a spinoff of the direct line:
Free/Net/Open BSD, Dragonfly BSD, but also 386BSD, BSD/ix, BSD-OS and
other long dead forms)
- direct clones or intentionally-compatible: Linux is the best-known,
Minix, but OS X also qualifies, & OSF/1 did too (and thus its scion
Tru64),
- things that aren't remotely Unix-like underneath but find it
convenient to sport a layer offering some degree of
Unix-compatibility: QNX, BeOS/Haiku, OpenVMS, Windows NT, some IBM
offerings, I believe.
Does that seem fair?
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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