Firebird At 20 Years

mAriuZ writes "From Jim Starkey: "September 4th is the 20th anniversary of what is now Firebird. I quit my job at DEC in August, took a three day end-of-summer holiday, and began work on September 4, 1984 in my new career as a software entrepreneur. As best as I can reconstruct, the first two files were cpre.c and cpre.h (C preprocessor), later changed to gpre.c and gpre.h. The files were created on a loaner DEC Pro/350, a PDP-11 personal computer that went exactly nowhere, running XENIX. Gpre was my first C program, XENIX was my first experience with Unix, and the Pro/350 was my very last (but not lamented) experience with PDP-11s.""

20 years?

[some guy I know]

How odd.
The homepage says that it has been in use since 1981.
That's more than 20 years.

Xenix or Venix?

[Liquor]

I worked with PDP-11's for years, and never encountered Xenix running on any of them. As far as I recall, Xenix was solely for X86 machines (and would run on a '286 - the only X86 unix before the 386 came out).

Are you sure that wasn't Venix? I seem to recall a company called Venturecomm or something like that produced a stripped down version of BSD 'nix for the PDP-11 at relatively low cost.

Re:Xenix or Venix?

[Phaid]

Venturcom Venix was a System V derivative for x86 PC's. It's basically an early revision of SCO Unix with realtime extensions.

There were plenty of regular AT&T Unix versions that ran on PDP-11s though.

Re:Xenix or Venix?

[Phaid]

Heh but I spoke too soon. There was also a Venturcom Venix that ran on PDP's [tuhs.org].

I used the x86 version in the mid 90's, and had never heard of the PDP one.