Is he talking about Venix, Coherent, PC/IX?

I think he's talking about hardware. I remember at the time there were 68k board kits that would run Unix. I didn't learn Unix until a few years later (on a Sun 2), so I stuck with my Z-80 SBC and CP/M.

Yeah...he even points it out in the article. There were 100 companies in that timeframe that were some more or less minor variation on 680x0 processor, 10Mb ethernet and Unix (usually from Unisoft).

Wow. 10Mb ethernet. I even remember in the late 90s "Fast Ethernet" (100Mbps) was a feature in small switches; that implied 10Mb was the default.

Commercial ethernet switches weren't a thing until 1990 (Kalpana), and 100Mb ethernet is from 1995. So, yeah, a lot of ethernet in the late 90s was 10Mb. It's still a thing today in some embedded applications, and switches still support it.

Most any switch that supports 10GBase-T will only auto-negotiate down to 100Base-T, and some of them will only go as slow as 1GBase-T.

10Base-T was an upgrade over 10Base-2 and 10Base-5 (AUI), but the latter were more popular in the early 80's.

Well, yes...since 10base-T wasn't a standard until 1990[1] it's a pretty easy guess it was less popular a decade before.

[1] https://standards.ieee.org/ieee/802.3i/1068/

I guess I hadn't stepped back to think about the difference between computer ethernet and switched ethernet. I _do_ remember hubs, though, so it should have occurred to me that we didn't have switching on day 1.

Even back in the mid to late nineties, you still had a bunch of different Unix OS's and their associated hardware:

* AIX / POWER

* Solaris / Sparc

* Irix / MIPS

* HP-UX / PA-RISC

And probably some I'm forgetting.

We're talking about 1982, not 'mid to late nineties'. None of those chips even existed. Silicon Graphics Unix was running on 680x0 based series 1000 machines (and wasn't called IRIX yet). HP/UX was running on 680x0 based HP9000 series. AIX was a couple of years away and would first run on the RT/PC development of the 801 project, not on POWER. In 1982-ish IBM did have a Unix machine tho...the 9000 series, which was a 68000 running Xenix. DEC hadn't started PRISM, much less ALPHA then...it's Unix was Ultrix on VAX and PDP-11.

Yes, I read what was written. My point was that there were still a lot of companies doing Unix systems years later.

No, there weren't. There were the few you mentioned, and a dozen or two others. I worked with most of them. The point was that in the early 80s, there were a far larger number. The only real similarity was that like the '80s were the days of mc68k and Unisoft, the majority of the 90s Unix vendors were x86 and System V, all from the same code base.

DEC Alpha was another big one.

Digital Unix (AKA: Tru64, OSF/1) / Alpha

That brings back memories. The first time I ever heard of Digital Unix was in college looking at netcraft.com's web server ranking, where it showed that www.amazon.com was running on OSF/1. I figured if Amazon was using it, it must be worth looking into. Found an Alphastation in an IT storage room and had some fun playing around with it. Good memories.

Yes, Alpha was incredible for the time. Sparc was a dog in comparison. Software wise, Solaris felt more standard though. I remember having to tweak open source stuff to compile on Digital Unix. Solaris almost always just worked.

That is how I took it. Xenix, etc, anything not deemed a "workstation" in that era's parlance.

I didn't mention Xenix because Lyon is obviously not including it in his list of bottom feeders, given that he distinguishes Altos (which runs Xenix) from them.