At the beginning of 2002, I reminisced
about the January 1987 USENIX Conference
in Washington, DC. The second
Washington snowstorm . . .
Ted Dolotta, a contributor to the -mm
macros and one of the managers of
USG, sent me these remembrances:
“The reason for this message is your
“Fifteen Years Ago in USENIX” item in
the February 2002 issue of ;login: – in it
you mention (in addition to the 1987
USENIX meeting) the 1984 USENIX
meeting in DC, snowstorm and all. That
started me reminiscing.
If my memory serves, the January 1984
USENIX meeting was also marked by
another “storm:” there was a lastminute,
surprise exhibitor at that show:
Big Blue, which set up a dozen PC-ATs
in a hotel suite (all regular exhibit space
being already taken) running the Personal
Computer Interactive Executive,
PC/IX, a single-user UNIX running on
the PC-AT and developed for IBM by
my team at INTERACTIVE Systems. (I
just looked at the User’s Manual for
PC/IX, and it says, smack in the middle
of the title page, “by INTERACTIVE
Systems Corporation,” with the IBM
logo relegated to the bottom of the
page.)
IBM invited all the attendees to come up
to their hotel suite and play with the system
at will; there were no canned
demos, no presentations – just UNIX
and a bunch of IBM guys, and my folks,
to answer questions. (Several of
asked me whether they could share a
suit.)
And notwithstanding the fact that
PC/IX eventually went nowhere, suddenly
UNIX was no longer a Bell
Labs/Berkeley/academia/hacker/nerdy
thing – it was in the mainstream,
endorsed by the largest computer company
in the world. A heady day, indeed!
The whole thing was just amazing (I
know I’m biased).
As I said, PC/IX was not a commercial
success; it was followed by VM/IX
(UNIX as a guest on the VM/360 mainframe
system) and IX/360 (native UNIX
on a System/360 mainframe); both of
these flopped as well. And then came
AIX: UNIX on the PC-RT (a RISC chip),
which IBM sells to date, albeit on much
more modern hardware. These ports
were done by my team at INTERACTIVE
(another outfit whose name
escapes me started the IX/360 port, but
eventually INTERACTIVE was asked to
finish it in collaboration with IBM/Germany).
For AIX, that team consisted of
18 people, including the support staff –
secretary, hardware guy, administrator,
etc.; IBM had a team of 350+ people in
Austin testing the stuff my folks built.
IBM was very worried about keeping the
project secret: we were not allowed to
open the window shades in our offices,
and the PC-RTs were chained to the
walls. I did tell you about the AIX manual
and their problems in a previous letter.
Speaking of manuals, I also explained in
another letter about the various issues
that arose in the context of creating
UNIX manuals within the constraints of
IBM’s practices – it was essentially Mission
Impossible; but to give the devil his
due, IBM graphic design folks did a
great job of designing the covers for the
SysAdmin stuff, since PC/IX was a single-
user, native-mode system that ran on
the PC-AT, while VM/IX was a multiuser
system hosted on VM/360 – something
I’m quite proud of to this day).
Anyway, the PC/IX binders were pinstriped,
very dark charcoal gray, with
white type, and a bud vase with a single
red rose, harking back to the original
IBM PC ad campaign featuring “The
Little Tramp” (Charlie Chaplin lookalike
with a red rose); the VM/IX
binders were identical, except for a vase
with a bouquet of red roses. It was brilliant.
Today, IBM is into UNIX in a big way,
with Linux mainframes and AIX systems
(the latter, I suspect, will be around
alongside Linux systems for a good long
time), huge booths at Linux World, and
a suit from SCO over alleged license and
copyright infringements . . .
But it was at the 1984 USENIX meeting
in Washington, DC, that IBM first publicly
put its toe into the UNIX stream
(no pun intended).”
Thanks, Ted. And a happy (appropriate)
holiday to all of you. One wonders
whether SCO realizes that INTERACTIVE
Systems wrote the first UNIX port
for IBM . . .
2004 marks a number of things: The
ARPAnet/Internet and UNIX will both
be 35; and Linux 1.0 will be ten. Lots of
fodder for a historian.
I hope to celebrate these events live at
Nordu in Copenhagen in January, at
USENIX in Boston in July, and at SANE