Venix

Venix is a discontinued version of the Unix operating system for low-end computers, developed by VenturCom, a "company that specialises in the skinniest implementations of Unix".

A working version of Venix for the IBM PC XT was demoed at Comdex in May 1983. It was based on Version 7 Unix with some enhancements from BSD (notably vi and csh) and custom inter-process communication mechanisms. In September 1984, Venix/86 Encore was released; it supported a number of early PC-compatibles, including the AT&T 6300, the Zenith 150, the (first) NCR PC, and the Texas Instruments Professional PC.

Venix Encore, which became Venix 2.0, was still based on Version 7 Unix, and ran on the DEC PRO-350 microcomputer (Venix/PRO), the DEC Rainbow 100 (Venix/86R) as well as PCs (Venix/86 and /286). The system contained a number of enhancements, notably tools to access MSDOS files directly on a DOS/FAT-partition and an updated ADB debugger. The system came in two flavors, a 2-user version priced at $800 and a 8-user version at $1,000. There were no technical differences between the two.

From version 3.0, Venix was based on System V. A real-time version based in System V.3.2 was released for the 386 in 1990.

The last version Venix 4.2.1 based on UNIX System V Release 4.2 (UnixWare) was released in 1994. The workstation system included the real-time operating system, NFS and TCP/IP networking, X, OpenLook and Motif GUIs and the Veritas journaling File System (vxfs). A development system included additionally an ANSI C compiler, a library of real-time functions, GUI development software, real-time development utilities, and selected industrial I/O device drivers.