Unix International

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Unix International (UI) was an association created in 1988 to promote open standards, especially the Unix operating system. Its most notable members were AT&T and Sun Microsystems, and in fact the commonly accepted reason for its existence was as a counterbalance to the Open Software Foundation (OSF), itself created in response to AT&T's and Sun's Unix partnership of that time. UI and OSF thus represented the two sides of the Unix wars in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Unix family of computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix

Unix is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, development starting in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.

Operating system collection of software that manages computer hardware resources

An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for computer programs.

AT&T American multinational conglomerate holding company

AT&T Inc. is an American multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company, the second largest provider of mobile telephone services, and the largest provider of fixed telephone services in the United States through AT&T Communications. Since June 14, 2018, it is also the parent company of mass media conglomerate WarnerMedia, making it the world's largest media and entertainment company in terms of revenue. As of 2018, AT&T is ranked #9 on the Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.

In May 1993, the major members of both UI and OSF announced the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative. This was followed by the merging of UI and OSF into a "new OSF" in March 1994, which in turn merged with X/Open in 1996, forming The Open Group.

Common Open Software Environment

The Common Open Software Environment (COSE) was an initiative formed in March 1993 by the major Unix vendors of the time to create open, unified operating system (OS) standards.

X/Open Company, Ltd., originally the Open Group for Unix Systems, was a consortium founded by several European UNIX systems manufacturers in 1984 to identify and promote open standards in the field of information technology. More specifically, the original aim was to define a single specification for operating systems derived from UNIX, to increase the interoperability of applications and reduce the cost of porting software. Its original members were Bull, ICL, Siemens, Olivetti, and Nixdorf—a group sometimes referred to as BISON. Philips and Ericsson joined soon afterwards, at which point the name X/Open was adopted.

The Open Group is an industry consortium that seeks to "enable the achievement of business objectives" by developing "open, vendor-neutral technology standards and certifications". It has over 625 members and provides a number of services, including strategy, management, innovation and research, standards, certification, and test development. It was established in 1996 when X/Open merged with the Open Software Foundation.

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Common Desktop Environment desktop environment for Unix and OpenVMS operating systems.

The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is a desktop environment for Unix and OpenVMS, based on the Motif widget toolkit. It was part of the UNIX 98 Workstation Product Standard, and was for a long time the "classic" Unix desktop associated with commercial Unix workstations.

Tru64 UNIX is a discontinued 64-bit UNIX operating system for the Alpha instruction set architecture (ISA), currently owned by Hewlett-Packard (HP). Previously, Tru64 UNIX was a product of Compaq, and before that, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), where it was known as Digital UNIX.

The Open Software Foundation (OSF) was a not-for-profit organization founded in 1988 under the U.S. National Cooperative Research Act of 1984 to create an open standard for an implementation of the UNIX operating system.

Ultrix is the brand name of Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) discontinued native Unix operating systems for the PDP-11, VAX and DECstations.

The PowerOpen Environment (POE), created in 1991 from the AIM alliance, is an open standard for running a Unix-based operating system on the PowerPC computer architecture.

OSF may refer to:

OSF/1 was a variant of the Unix operating system developed by the Open Software Foundation during the late 1980s and early 1990s. OSF/1 was one of the first operating systems to use the Mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University, and is probably best known as the native Unix operating system for DEC Alpha architecture systems.

OPEN LOOK

OPEN LOOK is a graphical user interface (GUI) specification for UNIX workstations. It was originally defined in the late 1980s by Sun Microsystems and AT&T Corporation.

The Architecture Neutral Distribution Format (ANDF) is a technology allowing common "shrink wrapped" binary application programs to be distributed for use on conformant Unix systems, translated to run on different underlying hardware platforms. ANDF was defined by the Open Software Foundation and was expected to be a "truly revolutionary technology that will significantly advance the cause of portability and open systems", but it was never widely adopted.

Unix wars struggles between vendors of the Unix computer operating system in the late 1980s and early 1990s to set the standard for Unix thenceforth

The Unix wars were the struggles between vendors of the Unix computer operating system in the late 1980s and early 1990s to set the standard for Unix thenceforth.

UnixWare operating system

UnixWare is a Unix operating system. It was originally released by Univel, a jointly owned venture of AT&T's Unix System Laboratories (USL) and Novell. It was then taken over by Novell. Via Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) it went on to Caldera Systems, Caldera International, and The SCO Group before it was sold to UnXis. UnixWare is typically deployed as a server rather than a desktop. Binary distributions of UnixWare are available for x86 architecture computers. UnixWare is primarily marketed as server operating system.

UNIX System V

UNIX System V is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, and 4. System V Release 4, or SVR4, was commercially the most successful version, being the result of an effort, marketed as "Unix System Unification", which solicited the collaboration of the major Unix vendors. It was the source of several common commercial Unix features. System V is sometimes abbreviated to SysV.

Unix System Laboratories

Unix System Laboratories (USL), sometimes written UNIX System Laboratories, was an American software laboratory and product development company that existed from 1989 through 1993. At first wholly, and then majority, owned by AT&T, it was responsible for the development and maintenance of one of the main branches of the Unix operating system, the UNIX System V Release 4 source code product. Through Univel, a partnership with Novell, it was also responsible for the development and production of the UnixWare packaged operating system for Intel architecture. In addition it developed Tuxedo, a transaction processing monitor, and was responsible for certain products related to the C++ programming language. USL was based in Summit, New Jersey, and its CEOs were Larry Dooling followed by Roel Pieper.

In computing, the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) software system was developed in the early 1990s from the work of the Open Software Foundation (OSF), a consortium that included Apollo Computer, IBM, Digital Equipment Corporation, and others. The DCE supplies a framework and a toolkit for developing client/server applications. The framework includes:

History of Unix history of Unix

The history of Unix dates back to the mid-1960s when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT&T Bell Labs, and General Electric were jointly developing an experimental time sharing operating system called Multics for the GE-645 mainframe. Multics introduced many innovations, but had many problems.

The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) was an operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley. Today, "BSD" often refers to its descendants, such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, or DragonFly BSD.

Locus Computing Corporation was formed in 1982 by Gerald J. Popek and Gregory I. Thiel to commercialize the technologies developed for the LOCUS distributed operating system at UCLA. Locus was notable for commercializing single-system image software and producing the Merge package which allowed the use of DOS and Windows 3.1 software on Unix systems.

References

Peter H. Salus American computer programmer

Peter H. Salus is a linguist, computer scientist, historian of technology, author in many fields, and an editor of books and journals. He has conducted research in germanistics, language acquisition, and computer languages. He has a 1963 PhD in Linguistics from New York University.

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