[ale] OT: Interactive Unix by Sun

[Fulton Green]

Wow. Someone still runs this. Waaaaay back in the day, there was a company
called INTERACTIVE Systems (yes, "Interactive" was always all-caps) that took
the AT&T source code for SVR3.2, ported it to the then-cutting-edge i386
chipset, and called it INTERACTIVE UNIX. I remember around the early '90s that
SunOS was still a variant of the BSD source tree, and within a span of two
years they had gone from shipping their proprietary windowing system (SunView)
to selling a combined X Window and Display Postscript-based NeWS server
called OpenWindows. Then they decided to take the AT&T SVR4 tree, added some
BSD features, and bumped up the major version number of SunOS (5.0?). Then
they ported OpenWindows and started selling the combined SunOS/OpenWindows
product as Solaris 2.0. Anyway, Sun had always wanted to get into the cheap
UNIX server market, so they snapped up INTERACTIVE, prepended the word "Sun"
and collected a customer base for their real scheme: to port Solaris to the
Intel environment and rob evil Microsoft of their plans to take over the
server market with a special multiplatform "New Techology" version of Windows.

Now that the reminiscence is out of the way ... you may want to do a
search on "INTERACTIVE UNIX" so you can pull up the page that describes the
"Y2.038K" problem it has. Sun obviously doesn't support this product anymore.

Is the system bootable off a diskette? You might be able to gain root access
that way, assuming the system is using a UFS- or FAT-based filesytem. Either
that or try some of that 1337 5hi7. :)

On Mon, Oct 16, 2000 at 10:39:17PM -0400, Gary S. Mackay wrote:
> Has anyone seen this product? I picked up an orphan client that is running
> this for their business. I searched Sun's web site, but can't find anything.
> My only clue so far is the messages just before the login prompt. I couldn't
> even figure out how to get it to boot 'single user' mode so I could get at the
> root password. I need to add a couple more terminals and printers to this
> system. Any help appreciated.
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