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onewobblywheel t1_j41g0oq wrote

I was an AIX "developer" working for iBM back in the 1990s.

I was involved in the TCP/IP subsystem. We started by downloading source code created by CS students in a few universities that IBM had donated money to.

Then we ran it through a series of tests, then made a few tweaks, if necessary, then put the IBM brand on it and shipped it.

That's how IBM did "development" back in the '90s.

Not much is lost by sending it to India.

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[deleted] t1_j41wj9w wrote

[deleted]

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onewobblywheel t1_j42hz6u wrote

30 years ago... I honestly don't remember. It was definitely one of the big ones everyone would recognize.

I always thought UNIX was developed in Bell Labs by one of the guys (Kernighan and Ritchie) who developed the C language. But I'm no authority.

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SatanicNotMessianic t1_j45elh7 wrote

I worked on AIX systems when I was first getting into computer work in the 1990s. The software was okay (honestly, Solaris was better imo) but we were running a token ring network and that was buggy as hell. They called them “broken ring networks” for a reason.

But man, I really did love that RISC architecture. It made assembly language feel simple and elegant rather than the cuneiform that was the iteration of the CISC chips at the time.

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madman1969 t1_j42dicz wrote

As a developer on AIX systems back in the 90's, this doesn't surprise me.

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Wade-Mealing t1_j45n5c1 wrote

How did the students get access to AIX kernel code in the 90's ? I thought that kinda thing was highly regulated.

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onewobblywheel t1_j462oko wrote

i'm afraid I don't know those details. I was concerned about copyrights/patents or whatever would have applied and asked about that. I was told that IBM funds their CS department and that gave IBM the right to use the code. We had an FTP account into the school's servers. That's how we retrieved it. I assume it was a two-way street with some contracts and agreements involved, but again, I don't really know.

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