What UNIX could my local ISP have been running in 1993?
January 7, 2024 8:53 AM Subscribe
I'm trying to remember what UNIX I would have been cutting my teeth on back in 1993 when the first UNIX machine I ever remote-touched would have been whatever my local ISP was running back in the early days of commercial internet. I'm looking for a range of likely possibilities, not a definitive answer.
Back in 1993 I was a teenage kid with a one-line BBS, taking it down to call in to the other local BBSs and play my daily turns of LoRD and BRE, etc. A new local company started providing internet access over dial-up, and I remember for certain that it was dialing into some sort of UNIX machine. This was pre-WWW. You connected into a terminal. You typed your ISP username and password and it dropped you to some sort of guided menu, probably Gopher, to get to the most commonly desired destinations. It also had a way to exit the menu and get you to a straight UNIX prompt of some sort, where you could type standard POSIX commands like ls, grep, man, all that stuff. That's where I first started learning about UNIX.
Purely for nostalgia and conversational purposes, I am curious what UNIXes would have been the most likely candidates for such a system to be running. It was definitely not Linux.
Unfortunately I don't know much about the actual hardware. This company was local, not a node of a larger regional or national ISP. It would have been something a Small Business founded by a group of local doctors would have been able to fund, unless they maybe got some hand-me-down hardware from the local hospital they were all attached to. My point being it was probably not a physically big system, but I don't know if it what architecture it was running on. Coincidentally, decades later I actually worked for this company and saw an old beige-box server tower and someone said it was the old system host from back in the day.
So what UNIXes would have been most plausible/likely candidates for this local ISP to be running in 1993?
Back in 1993 I was a teenage kid with a one-line BBS, taking it down to call in to the other local BBSs and play my daily turns of LoRD and BRE, etc. A new local company started providing internet access over dial-up, and I remember for certain that it was dialing into some sort of UNIX machine. This was pre-WWW. You connected into a terminal. You typed your ISP username and password and it dropped you to some sort of guided menu, probably Gopher, to get to the most commonly desired destinations. It also had a way to exit the menu and get you to a straight UNIX prompt of some sort, where you could type standard POSIX commands like ls, grep, man, all that stuff. That's where I first started learning about UNIX.
Purely for nostalgia and conversational purposes, I am curious what UNIXes would have been the most likely candidates for such a system to be running. It was definitely not Linux.
Unfortunately I don't know much about the actual hardware. This company was local, not a node of a larger regional or national ISP. It would have been something a Small Business founded by a group of local doctors would have been able to fund, unless they maybe got some hand-me-down hardware from the local hospital they were all attached to. My point being it was probably not a physically big system, but I don't know if it what architecture it was running on. Coincidentally, decades later I actually worked for this company and saw an old beige-box server tower and someone said it was the old system host from back in the day.
So what UNIXes would have been most plausible/likely candidates for this local ISP to be running in 1993?
While there were a number of commercial UNIXes in the early 90s, the ISPs I used were all running SunOS or later Solaris on Sun Microsystems servers, although the college I was attending had VAXen running VMS.
posted by eschatfische at 9:15 AM on January 7 [1 favorite]
posted by eschatfische at 9:15 AM on January 7 [1 favorite]
From Wikipedia's list of early BBS software, the Unix software was probably one of the listed choices.
As for the underlying OS, on an IBM Personal computer compatible machines, Xenix was very popular, but there were other variants, such as PC/IX and Venix. Linux "escaped" to the general public in 1991, so I suspect it wouldn't have been the answer.
If the iSP wasn't using a IBM PC style machine, it could have been many choices, as mbrubeck and eschatfische say above.
posted by blob at 9:16 AM on January 7 [1 favorite]
As for the underlying OS, on an IBM Personal computer compatible machines, Xenix was very popular, but there were other variants, such as PC/IX and Venix. Linux "escaped" to the general public in 1991, so I suspect it wouldn't have been the answer.
If the iSP wasn't using a IBM PC style machine, it could have been many choices, as mbrubeck and eschatfische say above.
posted by blob at 9:16 AM on January 7 [1 favorite]
386BSD or its commercial version BSD/386 are also likely.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 9:25 AM on January 7 [2 favorites]
posted by 1970s Antihero at 9:25 AM on January 7 [2 favorites]
Others not mentioned so far that I remember from the later 90s would be Irix and Dynix/PTX. But my bet is also on SunOS.
posted by rd45 at 9:55 AM on January 7 [2 favorites]
posted by rd45 at 9:55 AM on January 7 [2 favorites]
I was also really into Unix at that time. It was likely a Sun box. Although SGI Irix was the hotness at that time. Shoutout to Pyramid and Apollo and Bull.
posted by vacapinta at 10:29 AM on January 7
posted by vacapinta at 10:29 AM on January 7
The VAX at my college in those days was running Ultrix rather than VMS. It's also possible that they were running one of the BSD flavors; FreeBSD was popular in my world ...
(cringes remembering trying to make threads cross-platform...)
posted by chbrooks at 11:06 AM on January 7
(cringes remembering trying to make threads cross-platform...)
posted by chbrooks at 11:06 AM on January 7
Going by "beige tower case" there's little chance it was anything other than a 386 or 486 PC, and from that the OS would likely have been SCO Unix or 386BSD. It would also be the most economical choice, as HP (more grey-ish than beige), IBM (off-white), SGI (all kinds of pronounced colours, and definitely not beige) and the other hardware vendors offering Unix would be more expensive, both with their hardware as well as their software licenses.
Late 1993 it might have been Slackware Linux if they were feeling adventurous.
posted by Stoneshop at 11:41 AM on January 7 [6 favorites]
Late 1993 it might have been Slackware Linux if they were feeling adventurous.
posted by Stoneshop at 11:41 AM on January 7 [6 favorites]
Going by "beige tower case" there's little chance it was anything other than a 386 or 486 PC, and from that the OS would likely have been SCO Unix or 386BSD.
I think that form factor rules out anything from Sun (since they were more pizza box shaped, and I'd call them more grey than beige). I think it's possible that it could have been a MicroVAX, (which could have run VMS or Ultrix) but FWIW I also feel like 386BSD or SCO Unix would be more likely.
posted by fedward at 12:13 PM on January 7 [2 favorites]
I think that form factor rules out anything from Sun (since they were more pizza box shaped, and I'd call them more grey than beige). I think it's possible that it could have been a MicroVAX, (which could have run VMS or Ultrix) but FWIW I also feel like 386BSD or SCO Unix would be more likely.
posted by fedward at 12:13 PM on January 7 [2 favorites]
I was 'filing' before Christmas and dug up the specs for a DEC Alpha 3000-500 AXP server which my quango bought in 1993/4. We were used to VAX/VMS and so they were trying to sell us an OpenVMS operating system. Fortunately, we saw sense before purchase and switched to DEC OSF/1 that became Digital Unix. They really shouldn't have put me in charge of a tea-trolley but by Summer 1994, I was in charge of £36,000 worth of kit and 50 users.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:21 PM on January 7 [2 favorites]
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:21 PM on January 7 [2 favorites]
One of my local BBSes, Eskimo North Port, did something like this. They started out as a kind of Citadel BBS (Minibin, which was an odd duck to begin with: written in BASIC!) and then spun up some SunOS machines on a shared T1 lease. They worked hard to do things like make a Citadel-esque interface to the local Usenet groups, and were early EFNet pioneers.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 12:30 PM on January 7
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 12:30 PM on January 7
fedward: I think that form factor rules out anything from Sun
In 1990 DEC sent me on a training for Sun hardware/software (in Scotland, Glasgow IIRC), and a few systems were indeed somewhat like beige PC tower cases. The OS was called SunOS at the time, and those tower cased systems might have been 386-based. Not actually PC-compatible, hardware-wise, and AFAICR you could only run SunOS i386 on those.
posted by Stoneshop at 12:58 PM on January 7
In 1990 DEC sent me on a training for Sun hardware/software (in Scotland, Glasgow IIRC), and a few systems were indeed somewhat like beige PC tower cases. The OS was called SunOS at the time, and those tower cased systems might have been 386-based. Not actually PC-compatible, hardware-wise, and AFAICR you could only run SunOS i386 on those.
posted by Stoneshop at 12:58 PM on January 7
The NCR Tower had that form factor but it was not an Intel PC
posted by canoehead at 2:26 PM on January 7
posted by canoehead at 2:26 PM on January 7
Usenet was very popular in 1993. If you remember the company's domain name, or the names of the admins or other users, searching a Usenet archive has a decent chance of turning up posts from them - you may then be able to answer this question definitively (either based on the content of posts, or inferred from the headers).
posted by offog at 4:13 PM on January 7 [3 favorites]
posted by offog at 4:13 PM on January 7 [3 favorites]
I was going to say it was probably SunOS because Linux hadn't really taken off yet, but given the description of the system, I'd say there's a decent chance it was Linux. The first (local) ISP I used started in 1993 using Linux for shell accounts (and running their RADIUS server) and a Livingston Portmaster that handled the moderns.
posted by wierdo at 12:24 AM on January 8
posted by wierdo at 12:24 AM on January 8
Could have been an Altos, which would likely mean Xenix.
posted by HiroProtagonist at 5:18 PM on January 8
posted by HiroProtagonist at 5:18 PM on January 8
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posted by mbrubeck at 9:13 AM on January 7 [3 favorites]