mtXinu

mt Xinu (from the letters in "Unix™", reversed) was a software company founded in 1983 that produced two operating systems. Its slogan "We know Unix™ backwards and forwards" was an allusion to the company's name and abilities.^[1]

mt Xinu offered several products:

• mt Xinu was a commercially licensed version of the BSD Unix operating system for the DEC VAX. The initial version was based on 4.1cBSD; later versions were based on 4.2 and 4.3BSD.
• more/BSD was mt Xinu's version of 4.3BSD-Tahoe for VAX and HP 9000, incorporating code from the University of Utah's HPBSD. It included NFS.
• Mach386 was a hybrid of Mach 2.5/2.6 and 4.3BSD-Tahoe/Reno for 386 and 486-based IBM PC compatibles.

Apart from operating systems, mt Xinu also produced Apple-Unix interoperability software, including an AppleShare server for Unix.^[2]

The company's principals were University of California, Berkeley computer science students and graduates, notably Bob Kridle, Alan Tobey, Ed Gould, and Vance Vaughan. Debbie Scherrer was a later contributor.

mt Xinu is also famous for its light-hearted Unix-themed calendars, including:

• Command of the Month (1987–1988)
• Lessons in Art (1989)
• Platform of the Year (1990)

In 1991 a division of mt Xinu broke off to become Xinet.

Notes

1. ↑ Salus 1994
2. ↑ "Mt Xinu ships Appleshare for HP workstations. InfoWorld, 10 September 1990, p. 51.

References

• Salus, Peter (1994), A Quarter Century of UNIX, Addison-Wesley, p. 209, ISBN 0-201-54777-5