SINIX was a variant of the Unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

 operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

 from Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme

Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme

Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme, AG was formed in 1990 by the merger of Nixdorf Computer AG and the Siemens' Data Information Services division...

. Supersedes SIRM OS and Pyramid Technology

Pyramid Technology

Pyramid Technology Corporation was a computer company that produced a number of RISC-based minicomputers at the upper end of the performance range. They also became the second company to ship a multiprocessor Unix system , in 1985, which formed the basis of their product line into the early 1990s...

's DC/OSx

DC/OSx

DC/OSx was an operating system for MIPS based systems developed by Pyramid Technology. It ran on its Nile series of SMP machines and was a port of AT&T System V Release 4 . DC/OSx was the first SMP implementation on Unix System V Release 4...

. Its last release under the SINIX name was version 5.43 in 1995. Following X/Open

X/Open

X/Open Company, Ltd. was a consortium founded by several European UNIX systems manufacturers in 1984 to identify and promote open standards in the field of information technology. More specifically, the original aim was to define a single specification for operating systems derived from UNIX, to...

's acceptance that its requirements for the use of the UNIX trademark

Trademark

A trademark, trade mark, or trade-mark is a distinctive sign or indicator used by an individual, business organization, or other legal entity to identify that the products or services to consumers with which the trademark appears originate from a unique source, and to distinguish its products or...

 were met, version 5.44 and subsequent releases were published as Reliant UNIX by Fujitsu Siemens Computers

Fujitsu Siemens Computers

Fujitsu Siemens Computers B.V. was a Japanese and German IT vendor. The company was founded in 1999 as a 50/50 joint venture between Fujitsu Limited of Japan and Siemens AG of Germany...

. The last release of Reliant UNIX was version 5.45.

The original SINIX was a modified version of Xenix

Xenix

Xenix is a version of the Unix operating system, licensed to Microsoft from AT&T in the late 1970s. The Santa Cruz Operation later acquired exclusive rights to the software, and eventually superseded it with SCO UNIX ....

 and ran on Intel 80186

Intel 80186

The 80188 is a version with an 8-bit external data bus, instead of 16-bit. This makes it less expensive to connect to peripherals. The 80188 is otherwise very similar to the 80186. It has a throughput of 1 million instructions per second....

 processor

Microprocessor

A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...

s. For some years Siemens used the NSC-32x32

NS320xx

The 320xx or NS32000 was a series of microprocessors from National Semiconductor . They were likely the first 32-bit general-purpose microprocessors on the market, but due to a number of factors never managed to become a major player...

 (up to Sinix 5.2x) and Intel 80486 CPUs (Sinix 5.4x - non MIPS) in their MX-Series. Later versions based on System V

UNIX System V

Unix System V, commonly abbreviated SysV , is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by American Telephone & Telegraph and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, termed Releases 1, 2, 3 and 4...

 were designed for the SNI RM-200, RM-300, RM-400 and RM-600 servers running on the MIPS

MIPS architecture

MIPS is a reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by MIPS Technologies . The early MIPS architectures were 32-bit, and later versions were 64-bit...

 processor (SINIX-N, SINIX-O, SINIX-P, SINIX-Y) and for the PC-MXi on the Intel 80386

Intel 80386

The Intel 80386, also known as the i386, or just 386, was a 32-bit microprocessor introduced by Intel in 1985. The first versions had 275,000 transistors and were used as the central processing unit of many workstations and high-end personal computers of the time...

 processor (SINIX-L).

In some versions of SINIX (5.2x) the user could emulate the behaviour of a number of different versions of Unix (known as universe

Universe (Unix)

In some versions of the Unix operating system, the term universe was used to denote some variant of the working environment. During the late 1980s, most commercial Unix variants were derived from either System V or BSD. Most versions provided both BSD and System V universes and allowed the user to...

s). These included System V.3, System III

UNIX System III

UNIX System III was a version of the Unix operating system released by AT&T's Unix Support Group . It was first released outside of Bell Labs in 1982. UNIX System III was a mix of various AT&T Unixes: PWB/UNIX 2.0, CB UNIX 3.0, UNIX/TS 3.0.1 and UNIX/32V...

 or BSD

Berkeley Software Distribution

Berkeley Software Distribution is a Unix operating system derivative developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1995...

. Each universe had its own command set, libraries

Library (computer science)

In computer science, a library is a collection of resources used to develop software. These may include pre-written code and subroutines, classes, values or type specifications....

 and header file

Header file

Some programming languages use header files. These files allow programmers to separate certain elements of a program's source code into reusable files. Header files commonly contain forward declarations of classes, subroutines, variables, and other identifiers...

s.

External links

• Reliant UNIX/SINIX manuals
• Siemens Business Services - SINIX patches and support
• Sven Mascheck, SINIX V5.20 Universes