Yes, I think that Acorn were aiming to follow Sun's technological path, as opposed to the path eventually taken by the industry, that being plain old X11, which Sun themselves took once they had seen the writing on the wall. Acorn licensed NeWS in 1987, and if you look at the list of endorsements for Sun's integration of NeWS with X11, you can see the likes of Frame Technology present, so it makes sense that Acorn would go along with the technological choices of the principal application supplier for their system:
"Sun now shining on X- Windows standard", Computerworld, 27 April 1987.
NeWS also supported PostScript natively, which would have been attractive for the likes of Frame Technology and thus Acorn.
The heritage of Acorn's ARM-based Unix products is unclear. Although we may reasonably conclude that RISC iX is largely a port of regular BSD 4.3, there does seem to have been at least one predecessor developed for Acorn:
Whether that, or something else, was originally "Acorn Unix" is not recorded, as far as I have found. Previous discussions on these forums suggested that there had been a Unix implementation based on Mach, but this relied on the usual reports of things being found on random hard disks.
My own remarks in the referenced thread were made before I realised that Mach wasn't a true microkernel until Mach 3.0, but one aspect of Mach-based systems of that era was its ongoing relationship with BSD, which might argue against any mid-1980s attempts to deliver System V around Mach. Mach's predecessor, Accent, was used as the basis of a System V environment for the Three Rivers/ICL PERQ, however.
Note that people have previously apparently claimed that ARX was Mach-like or Mach-based, but nothing has ever surfaced to confirm this, although references have been made to other random hard disks possibly having source code for ARX. For all I know, people may have been unsure or confused about what they were perusing, perhaps also mixing all of these projects up.
"Sun now shining on X- Windows standard", Computerworld, 27 April 1987.
NeWS also supported PostScript natively, which would have been attractive for the likes of Frame Technology and thus Acorn.
The heritage of Acorn's ARM-based Unix products is unclear. Although we may reasonably conclude that RISC iX is largely a port of regular BSD 4.3, there does seem to have been at least one predecessor developed for Acorn:
"XI Software House Grows from Acorn", Unigram/X, 24 May 1986, page 3.Using the usual advantages of small-but-nippy companies over mammoth consultancies, XI Software beat such giant adversaries as Logica to the Acorn contract, and seems to be keeping the chaps at Cambridge content with the results of its System V.2 implementation so far.
Whether that, or something else, was originally "Acorn Unix" is not recorded, as far as I have found. Previous discussions on these forums suggested that there had been a Unix implementation based on Mach, but this relied on the usual reports of things being found on random hard disks.
My own remarks in the referenced thread were made before I realised that Mach wasn't a true microkernel until Mach 3.0, but one aspect of Mach-based systems of that era was its ongoing relationship with BSD, which might argue against any mid-1980s attempts to deliver System V around Mach. Mach's predecessor, Accent, was used as the basis of a System V environment for the Three Rivers/ICL PERQ, however.
Note that people have previously apparently claimed that ARX was Mach-like or Mach-based, but nothing has ever surfaced to confirm this, although references have been made to other random hard disks possibly having source code for ARX. For all I know, people may have been unsure or confused about what they were perusing, perhaps also mixing all of these projects up.
Statistics: Posted by paulb — Wed Feb 12, 2025 11:49 pm
