Contemporary Unix Products, (from UNIX System Administrator's Handbook by Evi Nemeth, et. al. In this book, we use the abbreviations ATT and BSD to identify versions of UNIX as being more ATT-like or more Berkeley-like, respectively. By virtue of lineage, Novell's UnixWare and BSDI's BSD/OS are the most generic systems relative to our terminology. Sun Microsystem's Solaris 2.X is an ATT UNIX with many extensions. SunOS, an older operations sytem from Sun, is a BSD-based system, also with many extensions. Sun publications sometimes refer to SunOS as Solaris 1.X. Do not be alarmed; this is just Sun's Way of editing history to serve current marketing needs. Due to popular demand, Sun has agreed to support both operating systems, at least for a while. DEC uses the OSF/1 standard, which is in turn based on the Mach operating system developed at Carnegie-Mellon University. Mach is derived from BSD (though the kernel and UNIX interface are structured differently), and OSF/1 systems behave much like BSD machines from an administrative point of view. NeXT Computer's NEXTSTEP is also an extended Mach, though it is not of the OSF/1 ilk. You might also encounter DEC machines that run DEC's previous UNIX, called Ultrix; it is more or less a vanilla BSD system. IBM, backware as ever, flogs a weirdo product called AIX, which they deny stands for "Ain't UNIX." It's, ah, UNIX-compatible? Silicon Graphics provides IRIX, which is similar to ATT. Early versions had all the good BSD extensions, but IRIX ahs been steadily creeping towards ATT-land ever since. SCO, the Santa Cruz Operation, sells a popular but perverse PC UNIX based on al old version of ATT UNIX, System III.2. It ahs been extensively modified. HP's system is known as HP-UX; it is mostly ATT-ish but with odd surprises of its own. Several free UNIX systems are available for PC hardware. The most popular is called Linux. It was originally written by Linus Torvalds of Helsinki, but now has a large and growing developer community. It requires a 386 PC with 4MB of memory and a 40MB hard disk. Linux internals and system administration are BSD-ish (probably closest to SunOS); its programming interface is more like ATT. NetBSD, 386BSD, and FreeBSD are PC UNIX implementations based on Net/2 from Berkeley. The require similar hardware.