OT history of the *

S*ny has two operating names: The star can either stand for 'o' or "ystem of extracting obscene profit with products that used to be good but are now about equal with about any competing compa"

Hope this helps ;-)

Actually I've seen the *nix wildcard to represent Linux and Unix and others but I've rarely seen it for other tradenames.

I've mainly seen it as *nix as well, but it seems to be quite common on web based fori, well the pro audio ones , anyway

martin

There are a number of uses of such names. People might use "S*ny" if they want to avoid actually saying the company's name (maybe their post is not too complimentary), or they might want to say something specific about the company on product (such as writing "M$ Windows").

In the case of *nix, the star is a wildcard - it refers to all Unix or Unix-type systems, such as BSD, Linux, Solaris, AIX, MacOS X, etc. Some of these are technically and/or legally Unix, others are not, but they all have the same basic concepts at heart.

It's the wild-card character from the Unix shell, and was thought to remove a possible trademark violation. Incorrectly, I believe.

In article , martin griffith writes: |> I've mainly seen it as *nix as well, but it seems to be quite common |> on web based fori, well the pro audio ones , anyway

Fora. Forum is neutrum :)

Or just use the common-english "forums".

Rainer

I was just trying to be clever, obviously I failed :-)

martin

There have beenmany different brands of Unix: Dynix (Sequent), Tnix (Tektronics), Xenix (Microsoft/SCO), Irix (SGI), AIX (IBM), Posix (IEEE), HP/UX (HP), and so on.

In a unix shell, a "*" matches any string, so you can specify most of the above with shell glob pattern *nix. *ix would be an even better match, but *nix is what stuck in the community mind.

I remember this usage from back when the alternatives to AT&T and the licensed BSD variants were just emerging. I was young and naive of course, and may have misunderstood things. But as I understood it this was because "UNIX" was a trademark of AT&T which meant that you should not lightly use that term to describe a non-AT&T operating system. But everyone knew that these alternate systems were "UNIX" in heart and soul, if not in name, so "*nix" was used to say that they were UNIX without having someone object.

I'd agree that the modern usage however is just to refer to any sort of Unix as a shortcut, rather than to avoid the scrutiny of the official name holder. Today "Unix" (with lowercase) can be used the same way, since it's not trademarked by The Open Group.

-- Darin Johnson