AIX/HP-UX Interoperability Guide (continued)
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The purpose of this document is to help users and system administrators of either HP-UX or AIX machines to understand the "other side," if you will, for the purposes of interoperability. This will help, for example, AIX system administrators integrate HP-UX machines into their networks, or HP-UX administrators do the same with RS/6000s. It can also assist HP field representatives understand the nature of AIX in order to aid customers moving to HP machines.
Each of this document's chapters addresses a single topic but usually contains several sections: a description of the AIX way of doing things, one devoted to the HP-UX way, a comparison of the two systems regarding the topic at hand, and some tips on interoperability. The issue of interoperability, however, will be more extensive in some areas, most notably networking, than in others.
The following are important to keep in mind:
Put simply, HP-UX is Hewlett-Packard's version of UNIX® while AIX is IBM's UNIX. But of course there is much more to it than that. Since 1969 there have been many strains and variations of UNIX, but by the end of the 1970s two major forms of UNIX existed: System V, owned by AT&T and usually regarded as the descendant of the original UNIX, and BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution), a product of the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley. Each had its special features as well as advocates, and for this reason workstation vendors, including HP and IBM, began creating their own versions of UNIX in the 1980s which more often than not contained elements of both AT&T and BSD types.
The HP-UX operating system is based on UNIX System V Release 2, with important features from Berkeley Software Distribution 4.2. It also incorporates features of subsequent System V and BSD releases, as well as HP extensions and enhancements. Other contributors to HP-UX include Open Software Foundation, Inc. (OSF(TM)), Carnegie-Mellon University, Cornell University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and numerous other commercial and educational firms and institutions. In short, HP-UX is essentially an AT&T-type of UNIX with numerous extensions.
AIX is based on UNIX System V and Berkeley Software Distribution 4.3 but is more of a hybrid of these two types of UNIX than HP-UX. AIX conforms to the Portable Operating System Interface for Computer Environments (POSIX) and to OSF. It also contains several IBM-proprietary features, such as the Object Data Manager (ODM) and System Resource Controller (SRC). Its windowing system, AIXwindows Environment/6000 is based on the X Window System with OSF/Motif and is an optional product.
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