mb@altos86.UUCP (Michael Burg) (01/20/89)
There's been a couple of inquires into ENIX, a port of AT&T Unix
System V 3.2. I was one of the head programmers for the Enix Division located
in Los Alamtios, CA (in Southern California - note: all marketing/sales/
production is done up at H.Q. in Fremont, CA). Hopefully this will
shed some light (darkness *grin*) on the subject....
ENIX V3.2 is AT&T Unix V3.2 for the 386. It is 100% binary compatible
with AT&T Unix for the 80386. It is 95% device driver compatible (minor ioctl
differences concerning with SimulTask/VPIX in various key drivers, but this
was being ironed-out when I left). There are BSD compatiblity libraries and
system calls ({get,set}itimer, FIONREAD/TIOCSTI, wait3 - sorry, no job control)
to make porting easier to the System V world. In addition, there is
a couple of BSD commands: w, csh, script (yes, there are pseudo terminals -
part stream,for poll()'ing, on the master side, part normal tty interface, on
the slave side). I far as I can recall all of the binaries that ran on
Interactive and AT&T port ran under ENIX (also, since it is the 3.2 version it
will run XENIX binaries too).
Tech support I would believe will be pretty good (I can't say for sure,
because again T.S was just being setup when I left). There was a plan to
have all the programmers handle the phones for 3 days out of every month.
Also, they wanted a less than 1 hour response time. Btw, phone support is
free and unlimited for as long as you own the product.
Machines that Enix runs on:
Just about all of the major AT-bus 386's including the PS/2 model
80 and 70.
Good Side:
Since Everex is behind Enix, there is a wide range of hardware
support avaible to the programmers at Enix for development. Also, it
means that Everex can start up development and production of PC products
for Enix/Unix. Also, there is little chance of Enix going under for a
couple of years because of the finical (sp?) support from Everex.
Bad Side:
The division has been around a year and a half now, and only have
started selling in the last three months. This means that they are a very
new player in the Unix market for 386's. They don't have a wider range of
support for other devices like other existing offerings.
But, this will change as time goes on.
Mike Burg
ucbvax!sun!altos86!mb
PS. They are looking for new hires in the position of programmers and
tech support. Contact me for me info.