Standardizing Unconformity 11at NeXTWORLD asked me what the difference was between AIX and
A/UX.“AIX is Unix from IBM. A/UX is Unix from Apple.”“What’s the difference?” he asked.“I’m not sure. They’re both AT&T System V with gratuitous
changes. Then there’s HP-UX which is HP’s version of System V
with gratuitous changes. DEC calls its system ULTRIX. DGUX is
Data General’s. And don’t forget Xenix—that’s from SCO.”NeXT, meanwhile, calls their version of Unix (which is really Mach
with brain-dead Unix wrapped around it) NEXTSTEP. But it’s
impossible to get a definition of NEXTSTEP: is it the window sys-
tem? Objective-C? The environment? Mach? What?Originally, many vendors wanted to use the word “Unix” to describe their
products, but they were prevented from doing so by AT&T’s lawyers, who
thought that the word “Unix” was some kind of valuable registered trade-
mark. Vendors picked names like VENIX and ULTRIX to avoid the possi-
bility of a lawsuit.
These days, however, most vendors wouldn’t use the U-word if they had a
choice. It isn’t that they’re trying to avoid a lawsuit: what they are really
trying to do is draw a distinction between their new and improved Unix and
all of the other versions of Unix that merely satisfy the industry standards.
It’s hard to resist being tough on the vendors. After all, in one breath they
say that they want to offer users and developers a common Unix environ-
ment. In the next breath, they say that they want to make their own trade-
marked version of Unix just a little bit better than their competitors: add a
few more features, improve functionality, and provide better administrative
tools, and you can jack up the price. Anybody who thinks that the truth lies
somewhere in between is having the wool pulled over their eyes.
Date: Sun, 13 May 90 16:06 EDT
From: John R. Dunning <[email protected]>
To: [email protected], UNIX-HATERS
Subject: Unix: the last word in incompatibility.Date: Tue, 8 May 90 14:57:43 EDT
From: Noel Chiappa <[email protected]>
[...]