Each company
would then port UNIX to its own equipment. It wasn??™t until about 1992, when the lab
was spun off as a joint venture with Novell (called Univel), and then eventually sold to
Novell, that a commercial boxed set of UNIX (called UnixWare) was produced directly
from that source code.
Published interfaces??”To create an environment of fairness and community to its
OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), AT&T began standardizing what different
ports of UNIX had to be able to do to still be called UNIX. To that end, Portable
Operating System Interface (POSIX) standards and the AT&T UNIX System V Interface
Definition (SVID) were specifications UNIX vendors could use to create compliant UNIX
systems. Those same documents also served as road maps for the creation of Linux.
In an early e-mail newsgroup post, Linus Torvalds made a request for a copy, preferably
online, of the POSIX standard. I think that nobody from AT&T expected someone to
actually be able to write their own clone of UNIX from those interfaces, without using any of its
UNIX source code.
Technical approach??”Again, until the very end of USL, most decisions on the direction
of UNIX were made based on technical considerations. Management was promoted up
through the technical ranks and to my knowledge there was never any talk of writing
software to break other companies??™ software or otherwise restrict the success of USL??™s
partners.
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