From: Bill/Carolyn Pechter <pechter@shell.monmouth.com>
Message-Id: <199808052115.RAA12664@shell.monmouth.com>
Subject: Old Unix Preservation -- How to save the SysV varients
To: pups@minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au
Date: Wed, 5 Aug 1998 17:15:52 -0400 (EDT)
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One thing about preserving the Unix varients.  There's a number of 
interesting (lesser known) versions with features that may be interesting
to study.  This may be because of my history major background -- or that
I spent too many years in Field Service for far too many vendors
of these boxes.

One example is Masscomp/Concurrent's early RTU which had dual 
universes (SysIII-SysV/BSD libraries), DEC-like ASTs and real-time processes.
Concurrent (originally  Interdata, Perkin-Elmer) also had a very nice
non virtual memory SysVRel2 called Xelos as well as Edition VII.

Another Unix (which I'd kill for sources for) is Pyramid's OS/x which
was a SysV/BSD4.2 dual universe box (with both sets of init/getty
and 3 UUCP's).  It was kind of the Universal Unix system.  
Pick your init, universe, UUCP... they're all in there.

AT&T sold these as System 7000's, Siemens-Nixdorf also sold them.
I worked for Pyramid and found it my favorite Unix to this day -- since 
I could mix and match features on the fly.

Both of these versions are pretty dead today.  I don't know if Siemens-Pyramid
even supports OS/x any more (probably not -- since they're going Reliant
SysVR4 and Solaris on the new stuff).  The main drawback to getting
these systems are they were was all implemented  on SysIII or
SysV releases -- so the licenses are constrained by the original "You need
a SysV source license to get our source code plus our license fee."

Bill