Interactive Systems Corporation

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Interactive Systems Corporation (ISC)
Founded1977; 47 years ago (1977)
FounderPeter G. Weiner
FateAcquired by the Eastman Kodak Company in 1988
Headquarters
Santa Monica, California
,
United States
ProductsIS/1, IS/3, IS/5, PC/IX, 386/ix, INTERACTIVE UNIX System V/386

Interactive Systems Corporation (styled INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation, abbreviated ISC) was a US-based

LSI-11 computer.[2]

ISC was acquired by the Eastman Kodak Company in 1988,[3] which sold its ISC Unix operating system assets to Sun Microsystems on September 26, 1991.[4] Kodak sold the remaining parts of ISC to SHL Systemhouse Inc in 1993.[5]

Several former ISC staff founded

Segue Software which partnered with Lotus Development to develop the Unix version of Lotus 1-2-3[citation needed] and with Peter Norton Computing to develop the Unix version of the Norton Utilities
.

Products

ISC's 1977 offering, IS/1, was a

AIX 1.0 (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) for the IBM RT PC, again under contract to IBM, although IBM awarded the development contract for AIX version 2 of AIX/386 and AIX/370 to the competing Locus Computing Corporation.[9]

PC/IX

PC/IX for the IBM PC running in a virtual machine
Not to be confused with NEC's PC-UX.

Although observers in the early 1980s expected that IBM would choose Microsoft Xenix or a version from AT&T Corporation as the Unix for its microcomputer,[10] PC/IX was the first Unix implementation for the IBM PC XT available directly from IBM.[11] According to Bob Blake, the PC/IX product manager for IBM, their "primary objective was to make a credible Unix system - [...] not try to 'IBM-ize' the product. PC-IX is System III Unix."[12] PC/IX was not, however, the first Unix port to the XT: Venix/86 preceded PC/IX by about a year, although it was based on the older Version 7 Unix.[13]

The main addition to PC/IX was the INed screen editor from ISC. INed offered multiple windows and context-sensitive help, paragraph justification and margin changes, although it was not a fully fledged

FORTRAN compiler and the tar file archiver, and did not add BSD tools like vi or the C shell. One reason for not porting these was that in PC/IX, individual applications were limited to a single segment of 64 kB of RAM.[12]

To achieve good filesystem performance, PC/IX addressed the XT hard drive directly, rather than doing this through the BIOS, which gave it a significant speed advantage compared to MS-DOS.[12][a] Because of the lack of true memory protection in the 8088 chips, IBM only sold single-user licenses for PC/IX.[12]

The PC/IX distribution came on 19 floppy disks and was accompanied by a 1,800-page manual.

PC Magazine at the time of PC/IX's launch flagged the $900 price as a show stopper given its lack of compatibility with MS-DOS applications.[16] PC/IX was not a commercial success[17] although BYTE in August 1984 described it as "a complete, usable single-user implementation that does what can be done with the 8088", noting that PC/IX on the PC outperformed Venix on the PDP-11/23.[18]

INTERACTIVE UNIX System

INTERACTIVE UNIX with Looking Glass interface under QEMU
INTERACTIVE UNIX 4.1a connected remotely via the wx3270 terminal emulator.
Interactive Unix manual

PC/IX was succeeded by 386/ix in 1985, a System VR3 derivative. Later versions were termed INTERACTIVE UNIX System V/386 and based on System V 3.2, though with elements of

PC Magazine reviewer for its stability.[19]

After its acquisition of Interactive, Sun Microsystems continued to maintain INTERACTIVE UNIX System, offering it as a low-end alternative to its System V.4-based

Solaris, even when the latter had been ported to x86-based desktop machines.[19]
The last version was "System V/386 Release 3.2 Version 4.1.1", released in July 1998. Official support ended on July 23, 2006, five years after Sun withdrew the product from sale.

Until version ISA 3.0.1, INTERACTIVE UNIX System supported only 16 

RAM. In the next versions, it supported 256 MB RAM and the PCI bus. EISA
versions always supported 256 MB RAM.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ This also makes it incompatible with most modern virtualization software, except dedicated emulators that fully emulate the XT hard drive controller.[14]

References

  1. ISBN 978-0-8330-4513-3
    .
  2. ^ a b Salus, Peter H. (2005). "Chapter 15. Commercial UNIXes to BSDI". The Daemon, the Gnu and the Penguin. Groklaw.
  3. ISBN 9780792396390. Archived from the original
    (PDF) on 2012-02-17.
  4. ^ "SunSoft To Acquire INTERACTIVE Intel-Software Division Of Kodak, SunFLASH Vol 33 #26". Sun Microsystems. 1991-09-26. Retrieved 2006-04-12.
  5. ^ "Kodak sells Interactive to US subsidiary of Canada's SHL Systemhouse". Retrieved 2008-09-30. [dead link]
  6. ^ Krause, Carolyn; Lyon, Barbara; Zucker, Alex; Clark, Bill (1981). "Winter 1981 Oak Ridge National Laboratory Review". Oak Ridge National Laboratory Review. 14 (1): 18.
  7. ^ "INTERACTIVE Systems Corp. of Reston, Va., has inked a distribution agreement with Government Micro Resources". Software Industry Report. 1991-03-18. Retrieved 2006-04-12. [dead link]
  8. ^ Felton, W. A.; Miller, G. L.; Milner, J. M. (1984). "A UNIX System Implementation for System/370" (PDF). AT&T Bell Laboratories Technical Journal. 63 (8).
  9. ISSN 0010-4841
    .
  10. ^ Fiedler, Ryan (October 1983). "The Unix Tutorial / Part 3: Unix in the Microcomputer Marketplace". BYTE. p. 132. Retrieved 30 January 2015.
  11. ^
    ISSN 0888-8507
    .
  12. ^ a b c d McMahon, Marilyn; Putnam, Robert (1984-04-02). "A First Look at PC-IX". InfoWorld. pp. 39–42. Retrieved 25 February 2016.
  13. ISSN 0888-8507
    . Retrieved 2021-03-13 – via Google Books. VenturCom's implementation of UNIX Version 7, quietly released a year before PC/IX, is a competent and nearly complete version with good documentation.
  14. ^ PCE can now run PC/IX and Xenix!
  15. ISSN 0888-8507
    .
  16. ISSN 0888-8507
    .
  17. U[SE]NIX," ;login: 28(6), December 2003 [1]
  18. ^ Hinnant, David F. (Aug 1984). "Benchmarking UNIX Systems". BYTE. pp. 132–135, 400–409. Retrieved 23 February 2016.
  19. ^ a b Vaughan-Nichols, Steven J. (15 June 1993). "Interactive Unix". PC Magazine. p. 240.

Further reading

External links

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