- In the begining (well once Olsen got over his anti-UNIX thing),
there
was ULTRIX on the 11, the VAX and MIPS.
On the /11? Ultrix seemed very VM-centric. (I.e. wanting post-11
TLBs and such.)
- When DEC decided to swich from ULTRIX to OSF/1, it started its
development on MIPS.
- To what extent OSF/1 on MIPS was seen in the wild is not clear.
Claims
range from, it was never officially released to, support for MIPS
existed
in the source tree for several versions.
My hazy recollections of the first MIPS workstations involved Ultrix.
(1.1?) No OSF until ...
- When Alpha was released, OSF/1 was the UNIX for it.
- When OSF (at least as an OS purveyor) imploded, DEC changed
the name to Digital UNIX.
- When the farm was sold to Compaq, it was again renamed to Tru64.
I think Tru64 pre-dated Compaq. Nothing much changed between OSF/DUX/
Tru (from the standpoint of someone who had to keep reasonably large
apps running throughout).
Of all the commercial Unixen of the era, the Ultrix follow-on
variants were the least painful to deal with. And the DEC MIPS-
derived C compiler kicked ass when it came to spitting out
grandmother-guilt-fed diagnostics :-) (Was it DEC or MIPS who were
responsible for the Spanish Inquisition error messages? While noisy,
the verbiage shortened a lot of other conversations :-)
--lyndon
