Radio Shack used to sell TRS-80 Model 16 microcomputers running Xenix in their stores to business customers. At least up until the mid-1990s, many local Radio Shack stores were using these machines as their point-of-sale, inventory and financial systems. Xenix in general was the most widely used Unix in terms of installs into the late 1980s.
>Xenix in general was the most widely used Unix in terms of installs into the late 1980s.
Interesting, didn't know that ... Because PC hardware was cheaper and more ubiquitous, could be one reason, maybe.
On a related note, UNIX became big in India (people used to call it a Unix country) in the mid or late 1980's, per what I've read, because of a government decision on computerization. The Rangarajan Committee (he later became the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, which is like the US's Federal Reserve) recommended use of UNIX as the operating system for nationalized banks' back-office automation, because of its multi-user and multi-tasking nature (and possibly / likely because it was cheaper than mainframes, maybe even because less proprietary).
UNIX usage in India took off due to that (thousands and thousands of bank branches in India), and hence many devs and admins developed Unix skills ... I was part of that trend, and benefited from it a lot, professionally, in terms of learning ...
My first Unix was some PC-based clone, the name of which I cannot remember now, but was also a while before Linux. Not sure whether it was before Xenix or not, though I used Xenix (SCO Xenix at the time, IIRC, or was it SCO Unix) a year or so later.
First Unix's name may have started with E-something. Everex? Not sure.
I think I also got to use Interactive Systems' PC Unix (PC-IX?) around the same time as the first one.
Soon after, moved to Unix on higher Motorola 680x0 processor based minicomputers, and even a multi-CPU SMP RISC Unix (from MIPS) for a while.
Later SVR3 and SVR4. Didn't like 4 though. By then (as I learned later) the UNIX wars had started, and it seemed to be a clunky hybrid of features from the SVR3 and BSD camps. Later worked a good amount on HP-UX too, on their PA-RISC business servers. Liked HP-UX. Pretty stable and powerful OS with a good patch management system and many other features and tools (HP PRM, Glance Plus, Ignite, MC/ServiceGuard, etc.).
The hp-ux mailing list was good too - very friendly and helpful people, I helped out others too.
Never got to work on Solaris, though, which I regret.
I remember I first wrote my selpg utility [1] on a HP-UX box (for a large corp customer, at their request), and then released it on the HP-UX mailing list. Some people appreciated it.
I did Xenix, DG/UX, Aix, got my first Linux distribution in the form of Slackware 2.0.
Tried to get Coherent before, but could not afford it.
Afterwards Red-Hat, Mandrake and SuSE were my favourite ones until I ended up with Ubuntu.
At work I also got to use Solaris and HP-UX.
My first experience with containers was with HP-UX vaults.
However I never managed to leave the worlds of Amiga, Windows and BeOS behind. Specially in terms of Demoscene, IDEs culture, graphics and game coding.
Didn't know about HP-UX vaults. Maybe it came after I stopped using HP-UX, or I just missed it.
Edit: Just googled, it looks like vaults came in either HP-UX 10.24 or 11.x. Think I used HP-UX versions 9.x and upto 10.20.
You're lucky to have worked on Amiga [1]. Read a good amount about it, including its power and performance, multi-tasking, in BYTE etc., earlier, along with the Atari ST, though never got to use either.
(Still remember an Atari ST ad, probably a big deal at the time: "A megabyte of RAM for $x99!"). And where are we now in terms of RAM ...
[1] And had read about Carl Sassenrath, wow. Did all that stuff for the Amiga, and then goes and creates REBOL, maybe single-handedly (?), with the language, and the libs, and the GUI.
