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AIX vs SunOS vs Solaris vs HP-UX vs Digital Unix vs etc etc. I worked one place that had IRIX, AIX, Solaris, and Tru64 on one site, for a company of only 600 p

AIX vs SunOS vs Solaris vs HP-UX vs Digital Unix vs etc etc. I worked one place that had IRIX, AIX, Solaris, and Tru64 on one site, for a company of only 600 people. Each with different service management, shells, low-level (hardware/firmware), backup, etc all to learn. Old UNIX was a fucking shambles, with companies desperate to break things in small and large ways to try and create lock-in to their flavour.

sysadmindotfail 6y ago
Believe it or not, places like this still exist. I worked at one (eerily similar story), then moved to a much larger company with even more platforms at one site. It was pretty silly.
vram22 6y ago
A.k.a. "the Unix Wars". https://www.google.com/search?q=the+unix+wars https://www.google.com/search?q=the+unix+wars
Theodores 6y ago
Networking added to the fun. Token Ring. VAX/VMS networks. Then some normal TCP/IP. Then these new PC things with whatever it was they had, which certainly was not TCP/IP. It could even be Novell. Then the network cards had DIP switches on them and things like thin-net or AUX big network connectors. This made things we now take for granted a highly skilled domain. Getting your IBM box to talk to the Sun workstation on the other side of the room was rocket science. The different dialects of UNIX meant that there were niches for those that knew the difference between how to run a 'ps' command on a Sun box to (say) an IRIX box. Incidentally I am not sure it was about lock in for all companies. IRIX was about doing things in 3D and enabling those applications to work. They had no interest in tinkering with UNIX to make it different for the sake of it. It would be different because they had different hardware and 3D to be standardised. I felt IBM was different just for the sake of it with AIX. The same with Sun except they dominated in some universities so were the de-facto standard for many people coming through education at that time.
pjmlp 6y ago
Try the same with Red-Hat, Ubuntu and BSD, to see how much it has improved, hint nothing at all.
- tyingq 6y ago
  It was worse. AIX, for example, had SMIT. You had to use it, or changes were only temporary. There was a lot more difference in those RISC Unix distributions than your current examples. Oh, and compiling open source programs across several of those. Real fun.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    I have started my UNIX knowledge with Xenix in 1992, followed by DG/UX and followed up from there across HP-UX, Tru64, Solaris, Aix, Linux distributions, FreeBSD,... Looking at modern distributions I hardly see a difference given distribution specific directories, packages or tooling.
    - tyingq 6y ago
      Well, for me "sh configure" has a much higher chance of producing a working Makefile than it used to, as one example.

sysadmindotfail 6y ago

Believe it or not, places like this still exist. I worked at one (eerily similar story), then moved to a much larger company with even more platforms at one site. It was pretty silly.

vram22 6y ago

A.k.a. "the Unix Wars". https://www.google.com/search?q=the+unix+wars https://www.google.com/search?q=the+unix+wars

Theodores 6y ago

Networking added to the fun. Token Ring. VAX/VMS networks. Then some normal TCP/IP. Then these new PC things with whatever it was they had, which certainly was not TCP/IP. It could even be Novell. Then the network cards had DIP switches on them and things like thin-net or AUX big network connectors. This made things we now take for granted a highly skilled domain. Getting your IBM box to talk to the Sun workstation on the other side of the room was rocket science. The different dialects of UNIX meant that there were niches for those that knew the difference between how to run a 'ps' command on a Sun box to (say) an IRIX box. Incidentally I am not sure it was about lock in for all companies. IRIX was about doing things in 3D and enabling those applications to work. They had no interest in tinkering with UNIX to make it different for the sake of it. It would be different because they had different hardware and 3D to be standardised. I felt IBM was different just for the sake of it with AIX. The same with Sun except they dominated in some universities so were the de-facto standard for many people coming through education at that time.

pjmlp 6y ago

Try the same with Red-Hat, Ubuntu and BSD, to see how much it has improved, hint nothing at all.

tyingq 6y ago
It was worse. AIX, for example, had SMIT. You had to use it, or changes were only temporary. There was a lot more difference in those RISC Unix distributions than your current examples. Oh, and compiling open source programs across several of those. Real fun.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I have started my UNIX knowledge with Xenix in 1992, followed by DG/UX and followed up from there across HP-UX, Tru64, Solaris, Aix, Linux distributions, FreeBSD,... Looking at modern distributions I hardly see a difference given distribution specific directories, packages or tooling.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    Well, for me "sh configure" has a much higher chance of producing a working Makefile than it used to, as one example.