*BSD News Article 4864


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From: farrow@ucsu.Colorado.EDU (J. Scott Farrow)
Subject: Re: Are you sure UNIX is a trade mark?
Message-ID: <farrow.716248205@fido.Colorado.EDU>
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Nntp-Posting-Host: fido.colorado.edu
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Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
References: <KANDALL.92Sep9170758@globalize.nsg.sgi.com> <farrow.716074432@fido.Colorado.EDU> <18ns8rINNd81@agate.berkeley.edu>
Distribution: inet
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1992 21:50:05 GMT
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ag@cogsci.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Gabryelski) writes:

>In article <farrow.@fido.Colorado.EDU> farrow@fido.Colorado.EDU writes:
>>>In article <KANDALL.92Sep9170758@sgi.com> (Michael Kandall) writes:
>>>The term "UNIX" has not fallen into common use in the sense than it refers
>>>to any "UNIX-like" product. 
>>
>>The hell it hasn't! AT&T/USL are several years too late. I was using
>>UN*X for over a year before I even heard of AT&T System V. At CU
>>Boulder, we don't even have any SysV machines that I know of, yet we
>>refer to all of our UN*X boxes as "UNIX". [...]
>>
>>Any other opinions?

>I noticed that in the paragraph above you used `UN*X' instead of
>`UNIX' to refer to OSs that were not UNIX but did have some
>capabilities of UNIX.

>Is this because you are competely aware of the difference?

>I would say `USL' is not *too* late.

>Pax, Keith
[...]

I was attempting to differentiate my use of the the word "UNIX" and what
we are discussing, which is whether or not that use is proper.

You missed my point, Keith. I maintain that the OS's I was referring to
are indeed UNIX. For reference, I've worked with Ultrix, AIX, Dynix, BSD, HP-UX,
and Concentrix and I consider them to all be UNIX.

Certainly there are differences between these products and that of AT&T, but
the similarities far outweigh/outnumber the differences (IMHO), hence my 
use of the word. 

As someone in another article (sorry I don't have the reference) mentioned, a
lot of common words today were once trademarks, like "zipper", for instance.
The comanies lost their trademark when the word became common usage. I think
that is exactly what has happened/should happen to AT&T.

Scott

--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
J. Scott Farrow - Student Programmer & Operator, Computing & Network Services
University of Colorado at Boulder, InterNet: farrow@spot.colorado.edu, 
farrow@hazelrah.cs.colorado.edu,  Phone: (303) 492-4428