Obscure/lesser known Unix Workstations? - Printable Version
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Obscure/lesser known Unix Workstations? - DeathEngine2 - 11-09-2019
Hi all,
So I was looking up Unix workstations on Google, when I came across the Omron Luna series on Google. It looked interesting, I put it in my holy grail list of computers, alongside SGI machines and the PC-9821 series.
Do you guys know of any Unix workstations that are lesser known than most or made by smaller companies?
RE: Obscure/lesser known Unix Workstations? - Irinikus - 11-09-2019
(11-09-2019, 08:32 PM)DeathEngine2 Wrote: Hi all,
So I was looking up Unix workstations on Google, when I came across the Omron Luna series on Google. It looked interesting, I put it in my holy grail list of computers, alongside SGI machines and the PC-9821 series.
Do you guys know of any Unix workstations that are lesser known than most or made by smaller companies?
Very Cool! (They seem to be extremely rare! I can't see any for sale anywhere!)
I also wouldn't mind having one!
RE: Obscure/lesser known Unix Workstations? - Raion - 11-10-2019
Solbourne, Apollo, the 3000UX are some of the lesser known ones. There's also ATARI UNIX
RE: Obscure/lesser known Unix Workstations? - William D - 11-11-2019
I once got a Lucent voicemail computer in at work to play with, it had AT&T Unix System V. Kinda cool to get to tinker with that.
RE: Obscure/lesser known Unix Workstations? - miod - 11-12-2019
(11-09-2019, 08:32 PM)DeathEngine2 Wrote: Do you guys know of any Unix workstations that are lesser known than most or made by smaller companies?Intel 80860-based hardware is quite rare. In addition to VME boards, there have been several workstations designed around it, mostly by japanese companies, such as Kubota (http://web.archive.org/web/20160729232514/http://computer-zoo.org:80/vistra/) and OKI (http://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/work/0029.html).
RE: Obscure/lesser known Unix Workstations? - jpstewart - 11-12-2019
I've mentioned them before: the early Intergraph workstations based on the Clipper CPU architecture and running their CLIX version of UNIX aren't nearly as well known as their later PC-based systems.
Appropriately enough for this forum, their workstation and server division was eventually sold to Silicon Graphics.
RE: Obscure/lesser known Unix Workstations? - shrek - 11-13-2019
I've been meaning to take a look at Data General Unix (DG-UX). According to Wikipedia it ran on m88k and x86 (32-bit), so if I can find the x86 installation media it may not be difficult to virtualize it. It uses the Motif based X.desktop as the GUI, which I have never tried before.
And while it's not technically SysV based, there are also the early Mac OS X previews like DP2 which uses pieces of the old MacOS 9 interface on top of Darwin/XNU and all the other stuff that's under the hood of OS X. For actual Unix from Apple there's A/UX which is somewhat known but still obscure.
RE: Obscure/lesser known Unix Workstations? - Raion - 11-13-2019
A lot of people, including myself, don't consider macOS 10+ as UNIX because XNU is based on Mach. It does have a BSD wrapper layer and a 4.4BSD-lite derived network stack, but the commonality with FreeBSD in userland code is less than 20% and the kernel code is less than 15%.
RE: Obscure/lesser known Unix Workstations? - shrek - 11-14-2019
(11-13-2019, 06:45 PM)Raion Wrote: A lot of people, including myself, don't consider macOS 10+ as UNIX because XNU is based on Mach. It does have a BSD wrapper layer and a 4.4BSD-lite derived network stack, but the commonality with FreeBSD in userland code is less than 20% and the kernel code is less than 15%.Real Unix System V based systems like IRIX, Solaris, AIX, etc. vary wildly in terms of functionality, OS level tools, drivers, file systems etc. Even if they do share a common code base licensed from AT&T way back when, the things that truly make an OS usable/useful in any capacity are completely different from system to system. They're only really united by common application interfaces like POSIX, X11/Motif, and sometimes compilers and other development tools, and so on. OS X is still very much Unix-like and offers pretty decent compatibility with Unix standards and does have certification through the Open Group.
RE: Obscure/lesser known Unix Workstations? - Raion - 11-14-2019
A certification from the Open Group means they paid them a ton of money to say "this is Unix". Anyone can technically do that and if you have a vaguely posix compatible OS with SuS-type setups, then it will probably get it.
UNIX is not a label you can buy though. It's a concept and lineage and macOS is a ukernel based on MACH, not a monolithic kernel with a lineage based on UNIX.
I draw the line at the kernel's design and lineage. They replaced the 4.4.BSD kernel with MACH for dubious reasons all the way back with NeXTSTEP, it lost any semblance of UNIX.
I don't consider Linux to be UNIX either for the same reason. I consider both macOS and Linux to be Unix-knockoffs.