On Thursday, June 05, 2003 5:22 AM [GMT+0800], M.K.Pai <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Indian Unixes on the Intel platform > > An old Wipro hack once told me that Wipro had their own > "WINIX" that could "run on any 486" ! > > Further, HCL had a Unix 386/486 based minicomputer > called Magnum, middle-to-late 1980s. Further, HCL had > promised complete hardware independence to their customers. > I have forgotten name of this OS. The OS for the Magnum range was "Magnix", that for the other x86 (Horizon) range was "Hicix", also known as HCL V/386 UNIX. A Hicix was the first Unix I was SysAdm for, in 1988(?). The machine had a card with multiple RS-232 coming out of the back, we ran them to PC-XTs and run HCL's software to connect. The USP of this software, and the most used feature, was that we could do file upload/downloads (a-la X-Modem). This was used by all Research Analysts, who trusted their 5 1/4 floppies more than my tape backups (sigh). The word "UNIX" appeared on the hard-copy manuals, so I believe they were derived from SVR4 code, under licence. They were very "SVR4" clones, no funny changes in command line, etc; this was different from my first Unix, Zeunix (?), from Zenith Systems, running on Motorola 68k. Zeunix had "friendly" commands, "l" instead of "ls", etc, and I was told by a senior that this was specifically so that Zenith could claim it was "better" than stock UNIX. However, the API was the same as AT&T, so I believe a licence would have existed. The Zeunix was not SVR4-compliant, I do not know the details. > I am sure this list would be overjoyed to hear from > Wipro, HCL and other Indian Unix vendors - who did > not create proprietory Unixes. These OSes are our > <wink> glorious </wink> heritage. The Hicix and Magnix were very "proprietory", the Hicix was licenced per-user. We had no access to source, not that we would have known what to do with it. The box was paid for by the Light Combat Aircraft project, and ran massive Computaional Fluid Dynamics programs developed in-house to calculate air-flow and stresses. Unix, not DOS, because of memory model. -- Sanjeev _______________________________________________ ilugd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
