HPUX was without a doubt the worst UNIX imo. Solaris was great. IRIX was great. AIX was neat, if a little weird. But SSH'ing into an HPUX box felt like you had been transported back into 1979 or something lol
I think the weirdest I encountered was Apollo Domain/OS. But SPP-UX was close as a microkernel with an HP-UX compatible personality on top.
But in some sense, every high-performance platform back then was an abomination. Whether it was the variant of AIX on an SP2, the weirdly unique Irix versions that seemed to exist in each Origin system at each national lab, or the painfully slow fork/exec on a Cray T3E frontend system when compiling apps.
Still good enough to learn UNIX, that was my introduction back in 1993.
The system was still expensive enough that we had a single tower for the whole class, we would take turns into the system, having prepared our samples on MS-DOS using Turbo C, with mocks for the UNIX system calls and conditional makefiles.
saltcured|1 month ago
But in some sense, every high-performance platform back then was an abomination. Whether it was the variant of AIX on an SP2, the weirdly unique Irix versions that seemed to exist in each Origin system at each national lab, or the painfully slow fork/exec on a Cray T3E frontend system when compiling apps.
pjmlp|1 month ago
Irix, Solaris and NeXTSTEP are my favourite UNIXes.
zeruch|1 month ago
pjmlp|1 month ago
The system was still expensive enough that we had a single tower for the whole class, we would take turns into the system, having prepared our samples on MS-DOS using Turbo C, with mocks for the UNIX system calls and conditional makefiles.