Interactive Systems Corporation

~ the last words ~

Before 1977, if you wanted Unix you went to AT&T, because AT&T was the only place it came from. Interactive Systems Corporation was founded in Santa Monica that year to be the second place, and it is the reason the phrase "commercial Unix vendor" means anything at all. Everything that followed, the whole sprawling industry of Unix licensees arguing with each other in court for thirty years, starts from this company deciding there was a business in selling somebody else's operating system.

The founder was Peter G. Weiner, a RAND Corporation researcher who had previously set up the computer science department at Yale and who had supervised Brian Kernighan's doctorate. Kernighan was by then at Bell Labs working on Unix itself, which gives you the shape of how small this world was. Weiner was joined by Heinz Lycklama, another AT&T veteran, who had written a port of Version 6 Unix to the LSI-11 minicomputer.

What they shipped over the next decade reads like a map of where computing was going. IS/1 and the versions that followed it, for minicomputers. Then PC/IX in 1984, which IBM sold as its own Unix for the IBM PC, putting a real multi-user operating system on a desktop machine years before anyone expected one there. Then 386/ix, and then the product the company is actually remembered for: INTERACTIVE UNIX System V/386, a System V implementation for Intel hardware that reviewers kept describing as boringly reliable. PC Magazine's reviewer praised its stability in June 1993, which for an x86 Unix of that era was not a small compliment.

~ the record ~

~ the kodak years ~

In 1988 Eastman Kodak bought the company and ran it as a wholly owned subsidiary inside its Commercial Imaging Group. A film and chemicals company from Rochester now owned the first commercial Unix business in the world, and for a few years it actually invested in it. ISC acquired the networking software firm Lachman Associates in 1989, and in 1991 bought VP/ix, a DOS-under-Unix compatibility layer, from Phoenix Technologies.

That was the high-water mark. Kodak had bought a software company during the period when every large firm believed it needed a software strategy, and by the early 1990s it had worked out that it did not want one. What followed was not a shutdown, it was a disassembly.

~ sold in pieces ~

On 26 September 1991 Kodak sold the Unix operating system assets to Sun Microsystems, announced through SunSoft. Sun, which was fighting Microsoft for the desktop and had its own ambitions for Solaris on Intel hardware, had just acquired the best-regarded x86 Unix on the market from a company that did not want it. In January 1993 Kodak sold whatever was left of ISC to SHL Systemhouse, and the company as an entity was finished.

Sun kept INTERACTIVE UNIX alive, after a fashion, for another decade. The last release was System V/386 Release 3.2 Version 4.1.1 in July 1998, a System V Release 3 derivative still being shipped in the year Windows 98 came out and Linux had already won the argument about free Unix on cheap hardware. Sun withdrew it from sale around 2001 and ran out the support obligations quietly. Official support ended on 23 July 2006, twenty-nine years after Weiner started the company and thirteen years after it had ceased to exist in any other form.

~ what it started ~

The technical inheritance is easy to trace and mostly invisible. Putting Unix on Intel hardware at all was ISC's bet, made when the sensible position was that Unix belonged on minicomputers and workstations. Every x86 Unix and every Linux distribution on commodity hardware is downstream of someone being willing to try that commercially. Former staff went off and founded Segue Software, which partnered with Lotus to put 1-2-3 on Unix.

The last release of this operating system shipped in July 1998, which is the same year I first got online at home on a 33.6k modem in Turkey. The two facts have nothing to do with each other, and that is rather the point: by the time I was dialing in, this thing had already been invented, sold, bought, dismembered and inherited twice over, and it had eight years of support contract still to run. Most of computing history is like that. It finished happening before you arrived, and then kept being quietly maintained underneath you.

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