Interactive Systems Corporation (styled INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation, abbreviated ISC) was a US-based software company and the first vendor of the

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

operating system outside

AT&T AT&T Inc., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...

, operating from

Santa Monica, California Santa Monica (; Spanish language, Spanish: ''Santa Mónica'') is a city in Los Angeles County, California, Los Angeles County, situated along Santa Monica Bay on California's South Coast (California), South Coast. Santa Monica's 2020 United Sta ...

. It was founded in 1977 by Peter G. Weiner, a

RAND Corporation The RAND Corporation, doing business as RAND, is an American nonprofit global policy think tank, research institute, and public sector consulting firm. RAND engages in research and development (R&D) in several fields and industries. Since the ...

researcher who had previously founded the

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...

computer science department and had been the Ph.D. advisor to

Brian Kernighan Brian Wilson Kernighan (; born January 30, 1942) is a Canadian computer scientist. He worked at Bell Labs and contributed to the development of Unix alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan's name became widely known ...

, one of Unix's developers at AT&T. Weiner was joined by Heinz Lycklama, also a veteran of AT&T and previously the author of a Version 6 Unix port to the

LSI-11 The PDP–11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers originally sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1970 into the late 1990s, one of a set of products in the Programmed Data Processor (PDP) series. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of al ...

computer. ISC was acquired by the

Eastman Kodak Company The Eastman Kodak Company, referred to simply as Kodak (), is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic basis in film photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorporated i ...

in 1988, which sold its ISC Unix operating system assets to

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

on September 26, 1991. Kodak sold the remaining parts of ISC to SHL Systemhouse Inc in 1993. Several former ISC staff founded Segue Software which partnered with

Lotus Development Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was sold to India's HCL Technologies in 2018. Lotus is most commonly known for the Lotus 1-2-3 sprea ...

to develop the Unix version of

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and with Peter Norton Computing to develop the Unix version of the Norton Utilities.

Products

ISC's 1977 offering, IS/1, was a Version 6 Unix variant enhanced for office automation running on the

PDP-11 The PDP–11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers originally sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1970 into the late 1990s, one of a set of products in the Programmed Data Processor (PDP) series. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of a ...

. IS/3 and IS/5 were enhanced versions of

System III and

System V Unix System V (pronounced: "System Five") is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, an ...

for PDP-11 and

VAX VAX (an acronym for virtual address extension) is a series of computers featuring a 32-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) and virtual memory that was developed and sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 20th century. The V ...

. ISC Unix ports to the

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included a variant of System III, developed under contract to

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

, known as PC/IX (Personal Computer Interactive eXecutive, also abbreviated PC-IX), with later versions branded 386/ix and finally

INTERACTIVE UNIX Interactive Systems Corporation (styled INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation, abbreviated ISC) was a US-based software company and the first vendor of the Unix operating system outside AT&T, operating from Santa Monica, California. It was founded in 19 ...

System V/386 (based on System V Release 3.2). ISC was AT&T's "Principal Publisher" for System V.4 on the Intel platform. ISC was also involved in the development of VM/IX (Unix as a guest OS in

VM/370 VM (often: VM/CMS) is a family of IBM virtual machine operating systems used on IBM mainframes System/370, System/390, zSeries, System z and compatible systems, including the Hercules emulator for personal computers. Design The heart of t ...

) and enhancements to IX/370 (a TSS/370-based Unix system that IBM originally developed jointly with AT&T ca. 1980). They also developed the AIX 1.0 (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) for the

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, 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 Locus Computing Corporation was formed in 1982 by Gerald J. Popek, Charles S. Kline and Gregory I. Thiel to commercialize the technologies developed for the LOCUS (operating system), LOCUS distributed computing, distributed operating system at UCL ...

PC/IX

Although observers in the early 1980s expected that IBM would choose

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Xenix Xenix is a discontinued Unix operating system for various microcomputer platforms, licensed by Microsoft from AT&T Corporation. The first version was released in 1980, and Xenix was the most common Unix variant during the mid- to late-1980s. T ...

or a version from

AT&T Corporation AT&T Corporation, an abbreviation for its former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, was an American telecommunications company that provided voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications and professional services to busi ...

as the Unix for its microcomputer, PC/IX was the first Unix implementation for the IBM PC XT available directly from IBM. 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." PC/IX was not, however, the first Unix port to the XT:

Venix Venix is a discontinued version of the Unix operating system for low-end computers, developed by VenturCom, a "company that specialises in the skinniest implementations of Unix".VenturCom ships real-time Venix/386. Computer Business Review, 1 F ...

/86 preceded PC/IX by about a year, although it was based on the older

Version 7 Unix Version 7 Unix, also called Seventh Edition Unix, Version 7 or just V7, was an important early release of the Unix operating system. V7, released in 1979, was the last Bell Laboratories release to see widespread distribution before the commerc ...

. 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

word processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicated to the function, but current word ...

. PC/IX omitted the System III FORTRAN compiler and the

tar Tar is a dark brown or black viscous liquid of hydrocarbons and free carbon, obtained from a wide variety of organic materials through destructive distillation. Tar can be produced from coal, wood, petroleum, or peat. "a dark brown or black b ...

file archiver, and did not add BSD tools like vi or the

C shell The C shell (csh or the improved version, tcsh) is a Unix shell created by Bill Joy while he was a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley in the late 1970s. It has been widely distributed, beginning with the 2BSD release of the ...

. One reason for not porting these was that in PC/IX, individual applications were limited to a single segment of 64 kB of RAM. To achieve good filesystem performance, PC/IX addressed the XT hard drive directly, rather than doing this through the

BIOS In computing, BIOS (, ; Basic Input/Output System, also known as the System BIOS, ROM BIOS, BIOS ROM or PC BIOS) is a type of firmware used to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs and to perform hardware initialization d ...

, which gave it a significant speed advantage compared to MS-DOS. Because of the lack of true memory protection in the 8086 and 8088 chips, IBM only sold single-user licenses for PC/IX. The PC/IX distribution came on 19 floppy disks and was accompanied by a 1,800-page manual. Installed, PC/IX took approximately 4.5 MB of disk space. An editorial by Bill Machrone in ''

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'' 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. PC/IX was not a commercial success Peter H. Salus, "Nearly 20 Years ago in U EIX," ;login: 28(6), December 200

/ref> 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, PDP-11/23.

INTERACTIVE UNIX System

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

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginni ...

added. 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 Solaris is the Latin word for sun. It may refer to: Arts and entertainment Literature, television and film * ''Solaris'' (novel), a 1961 science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem ** ''Solaris'' (1968 film), directed by Boris Nirenburg ** ''Sol ...

, even when the latter had been ported to x86-based desktop machines. This version of the INTERACTIVE UNIX System was praised by a ''

'' reviewer for its stability. 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 MB of

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM most commonly refers to: * A male sheep * Random-access memory, computer memory * Ram Trucks, US, since 2009 ** List of vehicles named Dodge Ram, trucks and vans ** Ram Pickup, produced by Ram Trucks Ram, ram, or RAM may also ref ...

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

Notes

References

External links

Interactive Unix Documentation
Defunct software companies of the United States Unix history Unix variants