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Firebird At 20 Years

Posted by Hemos on from the the-future-moves-fast dept.

mAriuZ writes "From Jim Starkey: "September 4th is the 20th anniversary of what is now Firebird. I quit my job at DEC in August, took a three day end-of-summer holiday, and began work on September 4, 1984 in my new career as a software entrepreneur. As best as I can reconstruct, the first two files were cpre.c and cpre.h (C preprocessor), later changed to gpre.c and gpre.h. The files were created on a loaner DEC Pro/350, a PDP-11 personal computer that went exactly nowhere, running XENIX. Gpre was my first C program, XENIX was my first experience with Unix, and the Pro/350 was my very last (but not lamented) experience with PDP-11s.""

4 of 20 comments (clear)

  1. 20 years? by some+guy+I+know · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How odd.
    The homepage says that it has been in use since 1981.
    That's more than 20 years.

    --
    Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
  2. Xenix or Venix? by Liquor · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I worked with PDP-11's for years, and never encountered Xenix running on any of them. As far as I recall, Xenix was solely for X86 machines (and would run on a '286 - the only X86 unix before the 386 came out).

    Are you sure that wasn't Venix? I seem to recall a company called Venturecomm or something like that produced a stripped down version of BSD 'nix for the PDP-11 at relatively low cost.

    --

    Liquor
    Sanity is a highly overrated commodity.
    1. Re:Xenix or Venix? by Phaid · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Venturcom Venix was a System V derivative for x86 PC's. It's basically an early revision of SCO Unix with realtime extensions.

      There were plenty of regular AT&T Unix versions that ran on PDP-11s though.

    2. Re:Xenix or Venix? by Phaid · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Heh but I spoke too soon. There was also a Venturcom Venix that ran on PDP's.

      I used the x86 version in the mid 90's, and had never heard of the PDP one.