Share commercial Unixperiences

vmisev said:
Do you maybe remember brand of plateseseters that Sun was running? That might help me with the search.

As for Kodak, I used only Preps as standalone app but I liked it far more than Signa Station. Although, as quality of output on film/plates goes, no RIP matches Heidelberg Delta Towers, their screening algos are superb (as much as I don't like one-vendor closed workflows, I have to give them credit for that)
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No, I don't even remember what the platesetters were. For both the XMF and Prinergy workflows, I used Fuji's Javelin platesetters, which were very nice. There was a Creo platesetter in there somewhere, too, and an Agfa.

Yeah, Preps, used that for a long time! One of the nice things about XMF was doing the imposition directly in XMF, no Preps necessary, and it was much faster and easier.
 
JWJones said:
No, I don't even remember what the platesetters were. For both the XMF and Prinergy workflows, I used Fuji's Javelin platesetters, which were very nice. There was a Creo platesetter in there somewhere, too, and an Agfa.

Yeah, Preps, used that for a long time! One of the nice things about XMF was doing the imposition directly in XMF, no Preps necessary, and it was much faster and easier.
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That XMF feature sounds like really nice. When you mentioned CREO, Heidelberg also based their first few platesetter lines on their tech, they had joint venture and it wonders me that they "allowed" Kodak to buy them?

What I liked about Heidelberg Delta RIPs was ability to do to jobs for any *setter, not only attached one, save processed jobs in DeltaList files and take them somewhere else for imaging. We had a client who had Delta with some small capstan imagesetter and bringing DeltaList for output on our B1. He was my fav client, there was nothing to check, nothing to worry or think about, just DL file to Delta Tower press button or two and job done!

IDK how is today, never worked with their Prinect workflow, when that was out I already moved to my own small format digital print.
 
I did some support of Solaris/AIX in the past. I used to have Solaris as a storage server back at home.
I still have (60+) HP-UXes under my support including its virtualization (HPVM/vpars, now merged together).
 
CShell said:
Unix was the "gold standard" back in the day.
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It was not. The great advantage of Unix in today's world is that it happened to be there at the right time, when PCs became affordable. Although there were operating systems "early enough" with V10 UNIX and – later – Plan 9, which took something as modern as a graphical screen for granted and didn't just tack on support afterwards, by then Unix had already gained momentum. Unix was and is "good enough"; a more modern operating system would have to catch up on almost fifty years of software development to gain similar market power. And that will be difficult.

ralphbsz said:
VMS was and remains the best commercial operating system ever.
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And it is not a (version of) Unix, not even remotely similar to one.

vmisev said:
But CDE become Plasma
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Not quite! KDE, in its first version (as was Xfce, by the way), was still conceived as a quirky alternative to CDE, but the two software packages had and still have nothing else to do with each other. Only the name was deliberately chosen to be similar.
 
I started to work with AIX at the beginning of 2025 - the customer uses them for various databases, SAP systems etc.
Except for a small journey in Solaris in Virtualbox, this was my first step on commercial UNIX systems.

It is not as comfortable as Linux or FreeBSD, as it lacks certain improvements in its tools. IBM provides the GNU coreutils and various other GNU software via their toolbox, which is what I use in certain cases.

X11 is not in use, although the CDE stuff seems to be there. Dunno if IBM still fixed issues with that.
Package management and operating system updates are nasty compared to apt/dnf/pkg.

The reason AIX is in use is that is was for a long time. For companies that don't already have it, there are not many reasons to proactively choose it, as software support is also limited (not many developers have access to AIX machines).
 
Yep.. worked at a bank a few years ago, their core systems al ran on AIX. Those systems were originally built on AIX and were destined to remain on that platform. The whole core itself was slated for replacement and that wouldn't be on top of AIX anymore.
 
AIX and HP-UX was also used by banks, often since the 90s, to run mission-critical applications, when Linux was at its beginning.
For me (born 2001), a time I never experienced.

The university I worked on had many AIX systems (also some Sun Solaris, e.g. their news server ran on Solaris according to old docs), the rest was AIX. Linux came later. When I joined in 2020, one AIX RS/6000 server was still present that operated a web server for user pages connected via AFS. The AFS was provided by RHEL later, as some AIX systems were replaced. That systems were switched off in 2023.

bvdw78 said:
Yep.. worked at a bank a few years ago, their core systems al ran on AIX. Those systems were originally built on AIX and were destined to remain on that platform. The whole core itself was slated for replacement and that wouldn't be on top of AIX anymore.
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To which platform did they switch?
 
They were exploring ways to run their core on Linux at some point, but nothing was firmly committed while I was there. Viability-wise I expect environments like these to go for Linux and k8s in some configuration.
 
Never used any. I got a SGI Indigo for free 20 years ago but it never worked for unknown reason. Now they are rare and expensive. I don't think I'll ever meet a UNIX box for nothing again.
 
back in college we had a legacy network that was colloquially referred to as "the three stooges" because of their reboot routine

crayola and prism were SPARC boxes running Solaris 2.7 and served the YP directory service to walt, the Alpha running Tru64.

walt, in turn, served /usr/local over NFS... to crayola and prism.

One of our shitty managers, some guy who just had it out for us for no obvious reason, mandated monthly server-room total-shutdowns-and-reboots, so we were incentivized to get it down to as few boots as possible

I think it wound up being:
boot prism and then crayola, wait for them to come up (establish YP), boot walt (so it can ypbind), reboot prism (so it can get /usr/local), reboot crayola (same), and hopefully you won't have to reboot walt again, but that's only our vague recollection.

crayola was the machine upon which all the linux geeks learned about what SysV-derived killall means, too. :)
 
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