Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?

Yup. SCO OpenServer 5.0.something, for some partner&#x27;s accounting department. Neither the OS nor the application software have been updated since the late 1990s, but if it works, it works, I guess... (to be honest: the application software is only used to run reports in response to requests from the legal department, but apparently still can&#x27;t be shut down -- I ask once a year, next upcoming &#x27;query date&#x27; in my agenda is March 2023).<p>This used to run on a Compaq Proliant server (huge noisy Intel 486 tower) until the end of the millennium or so, then was converted into a VM. First on VMware, then on Hyper-V, where it has been running comfortably on various hardware (Intel Dell PowerEdge, AMD SuperServer) since.<p>Access is the biggest issue, as the OS only supports telnet, and serial access. So ever since this has been converted to a VM, it runs on a dedicated VLAN (666, just to make sure nobody ever misunderstands the true evil underneath...), with an AD-authenticating-HTTPS-to-Telnet bridge (coded up in Visual Basic.NET using some long-long-deprecated libraries) connecting it to the outside world.<p>That VB.NET kludge was recently upgraded to .NET 6, in order to get TLS 1.2 support. This was surprisingly uneventful, and I&#x27;m pretty sure this abomination gets to live another decade or so.<p>Ah, yes, a career in IT... Always on the forefront of cutting-edge tech...<p>(Later edit to, like, actually answer the question: licensing costs are nonexistent: SCO is gone anyway, and we don&#x27;t require any support&#x2F;updates. Migrating to Linux might be an option, but is most likely going to be <i>hugely</i> painful, and the existing VM scenario Just Works for everyone involved. Security and such is not a real issue: only a handful of internal users have highly-restricted access via a proxy)

I used to work for Sherwin-Williams. The in-store computers run some custom *nix OS. The software that company runs on is a text based ui that hasn&#x27;t changed since it was introduced in the 90s.<p>They released a major update in 2020 that allowed you to move windows around the screen. It was groundbreaking.<p>But let me tell you, this system was absolutely terrible. All the machines were full x86 desktops with no hard drive, they netbooted from the manager&#x27;s computer. Why not a thin client? A mystery.<p>The system stored a local cache of the database, which is only superficially useful. The cache is always several days, weeks, or months out of date, depending on what data you need. Most functions require querying the database hosted at corporate HQ in Cleveland. That link is up about 90% of the time, and when it&#x27;s down, every store in the country is crippled.<p>It crashed frequently and is fundamentally incapable of concurrent access: if an order is open on the mixing station, you cannot access that order to bill the customer, and you can&#x27;t access their account at all. Frequently, the system loses track of which records are open, requiring the manager manually override the DB lock just to bill an order.<p>If a store has been operating for more than a couple of years, the DB gets bloated or fragmented or something, and the entire system slows to a crawl. It takes <i>minutes</i> to open an order.<p>Which is all to say it&#x27;s a bad system that cannot support their current scale of business.

AIX on POWER hardware, because it runs SAP, and between IBM and SAP they provide all-encompassing certification and support. Swapping out the OS would invalidate those assurances. Yes, modern SAP runs on Linux. Yes, it would be a good idea to migrate off AIX. But the system has been in place for 20 years and it will be another 5 years at least before that migration happens.<p>There’s a bunch of enterprisey technology that is not yet dead, but dying very slowly.

This is running Solaris.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usa.philips.com&#x2F;healthcare&#x2F;solutions&#x2F;radiation-oncology&#x2F;radiation-treatment-planning" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usa.philips.com&#x2F;healthcare&#x2F;solutions&#x2F;radiation-o...</a><p>Last I heard they were desperately trying to get it on Linux. Why it isn&#x27;t is because its a huge legacy application with some very horrible hacks specific to the OS.

Active HP-UX admin here.<p>the software being run is SAP R3&#x2F;Oracle and there is plans to replace it, but that is not happening anytime soon due to the usual delays associated with ERP migrations.<p>License cost is a red herring here especially when dealing with enterprise applications from the likes of like SAP, Oracle and IBM, heck were probably paying as much for our SAP on SUSE subscriptions as we do for our HPUX licenses, and the real license costs is with the applications and databases.<p>And it&#x27;s not that long ago(say 2014) that there were niches where the only real cost effective way to get enough single box io performance was to bye an non x68 box that came with it&#x27;s own unix, so there is a lot of systems out there where the hardware aren&#x27;t actually old enough for an 1:1 migration to make commercial sense and rewrites&#x2F;redesigns of ERP software is risky with most projects overrun both the time and budgets by an order of magnitude, if they don&#x27;t outright fail to deliver an new system.

It&#x27;s rather hard to get rid of some old CAD systems in the automobile industry. I was part of a bigger migration almost 20 years ago, when a rather big org moved from CATIA V4, basically running on all the Unices, to the new V5 version, which also ran quite well on Windows. I know that some SGI systems still had a slight advantage when there was a lot of stuff loaded (unified memory?), but they were on their last days.<p>Or so they thought. Now it looks like most of the engineers moved on to the slate green pastures of Wintel, but occasionally an old format or workflow tends to pop up. I know of some software still being updated for those old V4 machines 5 years ago, but I&#x27;ve been out of the loop since.<p>Same software is used in aerospace, too. Where you&#x27;re not switching to totally new models as fast, so I wonder how legacy-laden their software infrastructure is. &quot;Who here knows both French and early 00 SGI admin?&quot;

My last job (I left in October) still uses Solaris on the SPARC-64 architecture. It was selected because the customer, The Oligarchic Cell Phone Company, required NEBS (Network Equipment Building System) compliance (it wouldn&#x27;t surprise me if it&#x27;s Federally mandated) and SPARC had said support. The hardware reminds me of a freight train---slow to start, slow to stop, but once going, it keeps going and can handle a frightening amount of load. But all of the development is done on Linux and Mac OS---we just stick to POSIX and it all works out.

&gt; I also see that HP-UX, AIX, and Solaris are apparently still maintained and get releases, which suggests that they are still being used in production in some places.<p>When I worked for $(LargeDefenseContractor) we used Solaris for a defense system we were developing. Over time the older units (based on older hardware) would be passed down to the national guard. I would not be surprised if Solaris was still being used in obscure places in the military.<p>Solaris 7 was a pretty awesome OS as I recall, but pretty soon Intel and AMD started supporting linux as a workable OS option for their server chips. Then linux on the cloud took off and the rest is history.

Yep, still running Solaris 11 on a Sun server for SDH&#x2F;SONET network management. I mean it fits the bill, since both technologies are now ancient.<p>I can&#x27;t say bad things about the whole Sun&#x2F;Solaris combo though. It&#x27;s rock solid and requires practically no maintenance whatsoever.<p>Also, since it&#x27;s completely off the internet, it&#x27;s not like it could be compromised in any way.

I&#x27;m working with (although rather superficially) a ASML PAS5500 KrF DUV stepper. Its control workstation is based on some kind of unix (I guess Solaris).<p>The stepper is a tool that is too expensive to retire, and if routinely maintained, can remain operational and happily expose wafers for more than twenty years[1]. No surprise to see it contains some ancient (by consumer electronics standards) software.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.asml.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;news&#x2F;stories&#x2F;2021&#x2F;three-decades-of-pas-5500" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.asml.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;news&#x2F;stories&#x2F;2021&#x2F;three-decades-of-p...</a><p>Also, I used a HP 86142B optical spectrum analyzer last year, which runs HPUX.

I worked at Chef Software up until last year and we maintained binary distributions of the software (including ruby and lots of lower level libraries) that were built on Solaris, AIX and Windows in addition to Ubuntu, RHEL and FreeBSD.<p>Most customers were on Ubuntu&#x2F;RHEL&#x2F;Windows. There was very little on FreeBSD, AIX or Solaris. We had zero interest for HP-UX, I think that is dead enough to be ignoreable. Banks and financial services have a tendency towards AIX, while Solaris I think was primarily one customer that had a lot of legacy. AIX and Windows were the biggest pain in the ass, but every time we tried to kill support for it, people discovered sizable contracts that had been signed with us (yeah, our tracking in salesforce was bad).<p>My background is that I learned C and Unix on a Tandy 6000 back in 1989&#x2F;1990, then in college used and worked on a wide variety of O&#x2F;Sen (Dynix, BSD4.3, Digital Unix 4.0, SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.4+, Irix 5.x&#x2F;6.x (i think), something that ran on a VAX, NetBSD and later Linux). I ported NMAP to a bunch of those and did the original GNU autoconf work on it. I&#x27;ve been mostly Linux since 2001 (Amazon from 2001-2006).

If it ain&#x27;t broke, don&#x27;t fix it.<p>You are kind of combining two things though: legacy systems, and proprietary systems.<p>There are modern proprietary systems as well. RHEL is a good example.<p>I&#x27;d argue it&#x27;s not a &quot;small number of entities&quot; though. You&#x27;d be shocked by what legacy systems are running in the most important places on the planet...maybe scared. Unfortunately&#x2F;Fortunately, nuclear facilities aren&#x27;t running Linux Kernel 6.X<p>The fact is, a lot (probably most) problems solved with a computer don&#x27;t need further updates. As long as the hardware continues to function, all is well.<p>Something you may have not considered is that when the time does come, and the hardware does fail, I&#x27;d guess most organizations will opt -- and even go out of their way -- to source those same legacy components they had before to keep things running exactly the same instead of upgrading to a more modern solution.<p>I&#x27;ve had to do this a number of times for clients. Not long ago, I had to source an old mainboard for a system that was 20+ years old...in doing so I did realize there is some good money to be made if you can source parts for systems about 20 years in the past because the board was like $300 (this was 2017, and the board had a 33mhz processor and like 8MB RAM)<p>If you don&#x27;t have to touch these systems, count yourself lucky.<p>If you do touch these systems, thank you for your service.\<p>In regards to the modern proprietary systems, there are many, but if you consider RHEL for instance, there is a lot of value for large organizations. They can reduce the number on on-hand personnel whom probably would be less efficient at solving an OS issue than a RHEL engineer. As an example, the Federal Reserve runs modern RHEL...but I&#x27;d guess if you dig deep, they have some really old stuff too...

Last I used a Xerox digital printing press I was greeted with a &quot;SunOS&quot; version string when opening a shell - being some version of a Solaris. It wasn&#x27;t much impressed by my linux cli-fu. Looking at current brochures those still ship with it. Product is called &quot;Freeflow Print Server&quot; that GUI for the job queue looked java based as it also has Windows incarnations. It will do the raster imaging before printing. Good times

I&#x27;d argue Mac OS X is proprietary UNIX, but I&#x27;ll admit to that being a bit pedantic.

I occasionally work with a bunch of &#x27;em. AIX, Solaris&#x2F;SunOS, HP-UX, SCO, and a couple of others at various customers sites.<p>They <i>usually</i> are just running some closed source service that is too expensive&#x2F;impractical to replace, and aren&#x27;t causing enough pain and suffering to anyone so there is no business case for replacing them.<p>I like having them around. Sure, projects could be created to replace them with some modern webshit on Linux, but it would probably run into the tens of millions of euros, take years, and work less reliably than the shit that&#x27;s been chugging along just fine for longer than I&#x27;ve worked in tech.

The last &quot;proprietary Unix&quot; I worked with was AIX, way back in 2006. And that was only because their primary customer was an AIX shop. The code itself would actually run on Linux.<p>Previous to that (late 90&#x27;s, early 2000&#x27;s) it was mainly Solaris. One place was fairly heterogeneous, and had Solaris, HP-UX, Digital Unix (aka OSF&#x2F;1, Tru64), and a couple others.

Yes, mostly IBM&#x27;s AIX and a few ... ah the name escapes me now ... the top notch graphical design workstations of the time.<p>The reason are maintenance contracts for very long-term systems that never upgrade (they are ultimately completely replaced by something else).<p>They are similar to that old bulb in a fire station[1]: it is strictly forbidden to breathe when around these systems, if you sneeze you are fired on the spot :)<p>We had to move them twice between data centers. I had some popcorn with me when they were powered off, transported as if it was Mona Lisa and then restarted with the sysadmins not watching and asking for the flashing numbers. Good memories.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Centennial_Light" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Centennial_Light</a>

I work in Enterprise resource planning (erp) space. Mostly peoplesoft. I&#x27;m around things like sap, jd edwards, oracle ebusiness &#x2F; hcm cloud, rtc.<p>Proprietary Unixes are frequent and have probably made up 75% of my career including current massive project. Note these are modern and up to date, usually purchased brand new for implementation project hardware and software, not inherited legacy stuff (which seems to set me apart from most respondents here)<p>Several reasons but note I have very bottoms up perspective.<p>1. Support. I think this is the major thing. Having a reliable long term vendor with pricey well written steady support model is important to companies who use erp.<p>2. Related is perception and reality of stability. Aix on power is as proprietary as it gets. These things get rebooted once or twice a decade. Hardware upgrade to another frame is live migration through firmware. It is not fancy or pretty but God dammit baby it works. Perception is there too - that Linux scales well out but not up, that it&#x27;s vendor support is not at same level, that it moves too fast and breaks things, etc.<p>3. Deals and contracts. There may be legacy hardware footprint or client may get package deal with application middleware database and hardware.<p>My personal perspective? Proprietary Unix is ahead on internals, behind on shiny,boring and reliable. There&#x27;s a lot to be said for distributed cheap boxes over proprietary big boxes. But I don&#x27;t think modern SREs fully grok how much I never had to deal with hardware or OS issue or outage on these things. Anecdata sample size =1 + gossip, but it&#x27;s just a very different mindset and, here&#x27;s the trick, there&#x27;s nothing inherently wrong with that mindset, even if it&#x27;s not currently in vogue.<p>I prefer to work with Linux for a few reasons, including shiny and resume-helpful, but honestly, from business &#x2F; management perspective, a grouchy experienced aix sysadmin on Power stack makes my job a lot easier.<p>Edit &#x2F; p.s. Again these are modern os&#x27;es and support Gui and tunnelling.... But I don&#x27;t think anybody ever uses them. The application stack running on top is certainly modern and gui&#x2F;Web, but installing and supporting OS, database, middleware and apps is all cli, very obscure, very efficient, very powerful.

Towards 2014 or 2015 my previous work (some hosting company) had some AIX, Solaris and SCO, as well as some IBM i (aka OS 400) which isn&#x27;t a Unix. AFAIK they were used because of choices of slow-moving&#x2F;risk-averse big corps, mostly to run some java software or oracle&#x2F;postgres&#x2F;sybase databases that could just as well run on Linux.<p>My take on each of the OSes was:<p>AIX and the associated IBM stuff is kind of a mess. I encountered a bug where &#x2F;etc&#x2F;filesystems (fstab equivalent) was parsed differently during boot than when using the mount command manually. The focus seemed to be on the use of the menu-driven smit utility as the primary admin tool, with automation of admin tasks an afterthought. The builtin commands are often not very practical, requiring multiple steps to do things that you&#x27;re used to do in one on Linux. Installing some open-source tools is essential to sanity. Some of IBM&#x27;s own tools are using expect on their own software (looking at you lpar_netboot).<p>SCO is clearly unmaintained stuff that looks like it dates from 30 years ago. At least it&#x27;s simple to use.<p>Solaris had some nice features, like Zones or ZFS, but much to my dismay I couldn&#x27;t play with them as I was made to install an old version of the OS as the newer version wasn&#x27;t listed as supported by the version of Sybase that was to be installed on it.

In around 2004 I worked for a big five company. They were using some AIX, Solaris and HP-UX next to Linux which was still seen as that new thing. I remember having a training on some software where HP UX workstations where wheeled in. But those were really getting old at that point.<p>I worked at an ISP in 2007 which was running mostly on Sun hardware and Solaris. This was because of huge discounts provided by Sun. Most devs ran Linux on their workstations. In 2014 I got to work with some guy whose previous project had been at that ISP, who was at that point desperately trying to move off Solaris because they had to start paying list price for the OS and it was much too expensive.

Not since 2002. Irix, HP&#x2F;UX, Solaris.<p>Correction: It has been pointed out to me that I&#x27;m currently using macOS which, Darwin non-withstanding, is technically a proprietary UNIX.

Heaps! My main clients use AIX on Power for most database workloads (DB2). I had a client that used HPUX for everything (SAP). One could Telnet into their core accounting system from the corporate network.

I work at a telco. We have many museum-grade Unices in production, mostly AIX and Solaris - we even have a Wang still running in one of our datacenters. It&#x27;s largely a case of there isn&#x27;t a business case to migrate it to modern hardware - one day we&#x27;ll no longer operate a legacy copper PSTN network, but until that day comes, we still need it all. We still have maintenance contracts on some hardware, like our Sun Fires. It&#x27;s very clear that replacement parts are scavenged from whatever they can find second hand.<p>I recently rewrote the system we use to push user accounts and passwords to systems that don&#x27;t support LDAP. It was amusing to write an app using a current-day stack on RHEL 8 that purely exists to handle these very legacy systems.<p>One of my favourite systems I&#x27;ve had to work on is running Solaris 2.5.1. Users are added to the program by editing the source code and recompiling it. How times have changed.

Allied Irish Banks is still using Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX at the same time, according to a job posting I&#x27;ve seen.

Until last year I worked for a financial services company which was so big it&#x27;s owner ran for President. While I was there, they were doing a major project to move key, irreplaceable core components off of big iron Solaris and AIX machines, and onto Linux on private clouds or commodity machines. Hell, I even worked a (tiny) portion of the project. It might be finished by now? Maybe?

Haven&#x27;t used any non-Linux stuff in forever, but i have generally fond memories of working on SGI (perl and c&#x2F;cgi&#x2F;nsapi at weather channel), Solaris (oracle db and java web apps at riaa), and SCO (java&#x2F;servlets -- and javascript&#x2F;netscape&#x2F;livewire -- at startup confluence software, not atlassian), aix at small energy company, etc. -- the shit was just all over the place.<p>and it was kind of great. kept things interesting, at a minimum.<p>once linux and red hat starting gaining real traction in industry, i felt like losing all these high-priced unix distributions was kind of... lame.<p>i always had this idea, for instance, that working on&#x2F;with Solaris -- i was driving this high performance _machine_ that was capable of doing almost anything, as long as i was up to the task - the Mercedes of OSs.<p>losing all those -- i would kind of compare it to how the English language - like the Linux OS - is taking over the world. at the same time that is happening, either as a direct result or something less than that, we&#x27;re losing all these other languages. ditto biodiversity loss. ditto city gentrification &#x2F; sameness &#x2F; sterility. it feels wrong &#x2F; unhealthy.<p>¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2018&#x2F;jul&#x2F;27&#x2F;english-language-global-dominance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2018&#x2F;jul&#x2F;27&#x2F;english-languag...</a><p>what i&#x27;m saying is i miss the days of BeOS. :)

I&#x27;ve used AIX, HP-UX, OEL (Oracle Enterprise Linux) and RHEL. Probably some other distros. We use it because there&#x27;s a support contract and that sort of thinking is surprisingly durable. Also because it costs money to migrate.

Last time I got near any sort of proprietary unix was probably AIX at IBM. It is still actively developed for their p-series POWER servers. But that was probably 7 years ago now.<p>Back in the 00s it was common to have to work on multiple proprietary platforms. I did a lot of platform engineering work for one product that ran across Solaris (Sparc and x86), AIX (POWER), HPUX (PA-RISC and Itanium), Linux (x86 and System Z) and Windows.<p>Now ... if I&#x27;m lucky I don&#x27;t have to care about the platform at all, I just write lambdas in my language of choice and throw them at AWS. It&#x27;s a very different world!

In 2010-2011 I worked for (major American semiconductor firm), which had some test and validation teams on Sparc workstations running Solaris, and some design, test, and validation teams on Windows workstations with remote desktop clients for virtualized RedHat.<p>There was a common set of cshell based tools used between those two environments, among other 90s style Unix tools, like software written againt the SunOS Open Look widgets, and tools written in Tcl&#x2F;Tk.<p>I wonder if those machines are still in use!

I worked on a system deployed on AIX for a few years. We used it to distribute batch workloads in parallel across a cluster of machines - no other software and OS did such a thing, maybe still doesn&#x27;t. The machines themselves were PowerPC RS6000&#x27;s which only ran AIX. The company already had a close relationship with IBM because they&#x27;d been running mainframes for decades. They made tons of money so saving money on licence costs was not important.

We have a number of financial services apps running on Solaris. The cost of the licenses and hardware is insignificant compared to the cost of porting those apps to something else. You&#x27;ll find that as the reason most folks stay on these platforms.<p>We also apparently still have some AIX, but I&#x27;m not sure what it supports. AIX is still somewhat popular in financial services; probably others as well.<p>I know of a couple large HP&#x2F;UX shops left.

I work in electronic design automation. When I started, Solaris on Sparcs was dominant and we supported a number of Unix flavors, but all that died long ago, Linux killed it off. The Solaris port was the last to die, and we were very happy when it went so we no longer had to support their crappy proprietary C++ compiler that, at the time, still was missing important C++98 features.

Isn’t <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oxide.computer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oxide.computer&#x2F;</a> continuing development of SmartOS (which is based on OpenSolaris)

Usually it&#x27;s because there&#x27;s a database license or something that costs even more than the OS. No one wants to be there, but it possible to get trapped.

I heard that Boeing archived an Apollo Domain network, because some engineering documentation was developed on it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Apollo&#x2F;Domain" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Apollo&#x2F;Domain</a>

How about proprietary &quot;non unix&#x27;s&quot;?<p>Anyone running VMS? RSTS&#x2F;E ? Or on rare hardware, OS-32 on a PE 8&#x2F;32, or MPX on any SEL 32 family? MPE on Harris ?

A lot of the gas industry (wholesale fuel distributors) are still using AIX and OpenVMS. A lot of proprietary integrations, I presume, as well as ties to very very low powered chips and devices (have you seen how slow a gas pump computer is sometimes?)

In ‘05-10 timeframe we had a selection of Sun machines around the engineering department running various software and were even evaluating new Sun hardware for file servers when ZFS was new.<p>Later on in eh, 2015 or so I worked at a company providing backup software that was tested and worked with every niche unix hardware under the sun. Usually to support large legacy industrial companies, think defense, materials, etc. who still used the hardware.<p>Banks will also use these things mostly for legacy reasons. The software got written once and has been working and validated for decades, no reason to rewrite it for a different OS just because.<p>Price is usually not a major factor when compared to the size of the business and number of employees.

In my very first job experience, at the end of &#x27;00, we had a couple of SCO Unix systems that needed to remain active to keep developing software for legacy customers. They were running on Olivetti M24 back from the 80s; it was a nightmare to find spare parts on Ebay when something broke. There was also a couple of x86 workstations running OS2 Warp for other customers. The colleagues told me that the SCO Unix are still there and OS2 workstations were virtualized 3 years ago.

macOS is the most widely used UNIX on the planet.

Back when I worked at OmniTI (from like 2015 to 2017), we had an in-house Illumos neé Solaris distro for cloud servers named OmniOS. I didn&#x27;t use it too much myself as it was somewhat legacy but all the other devs who used it for prod debugging loved all the dtrace&#x2F;zfs stuffs on it.

Believe it or not, UNIX isn&#x27;t quite dead yet -- it&#x27;s just resting. In certain embedded environments, we use things like what was once called BSD&#x2F;386. WindRiver took a UNIX and worked to make it suitable for real-time requiremewnts.

I started in the industry when you were born, with IRIX, HPUX (horrible) and Solaris. I was on Linux by 97&#x2F;98 and I haven&#x27;t seen a *nix system in production use in a workplace that I&#x27;ve been in since about 2010.

Yes - Unix subsystem on z&#x2F;OS (USS) and thanks to zowe.org there is finally some open source code as well [1] [2]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;zowe&#x2F;zowe-common-c">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;zowe&#x2F;zowe-common-c</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;zowe&#x2F;zss">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;zowe&#x2F;zss</a>

I worked for the DOD, and we used hardened RH servers, accessed through jump boxes&#x2F;Putty, and Windows machines, and at least one Solaris box, though I never had a handle on what that was for.

Not myself directly, but about 5 years ago I was doing some work for one space agency and there were some Solaris clusters which were older than me.<p>I’m pretty certain most if not all are still running.

Not lately, at a previous job we worked with Linuxes, Solaris, AIX, HP&#x2F;UX and Linux on 390 mainframes.<p>The reason I&#x27;m chiming in is to give my advice to those still dealing with these; learn vi, at least enough to edit config files. It&#x27;s the only editor you can find on all of these, and you often can&#x27;t install your own software.

Tangentially related since there has been a lot of talk about working with ancient systems: does anyone working with TXDOT know if they are still using mainframe systems to drive their core database and services? I worked with a quasi governmental agency about a decade ago and became pretty intimately familiar with their mainframe setup. Didn’t look like it was going away anytime soon when I was there.

I worked in a semiconductor probe and test group and we had many older Teradynes connected to Sun computers running Solaris.. There were also old mainframes running Solaris (these were slowly being sunset but from my understanding, it was challenging due to many many cronjobs, etc..). We were tasked with keeping all systems up year round, which made any type of migration slow.

Not for almost 20 years. HIGP&#x2F;SOEST used SunOS.

Not since 2012. Company ran on a big Oracle DB on very expensive Solaris machines. They started in 98 or 99 so this was a vaguely defensible choice.<p>Several times we looked at moving the DB to Linux&#x2F;x86 but Oracle&#x27;s pricing made it non-economical, or so I was told. All the app-tier servers (Java) ran Linux.<p>Haven&#x27;t used a non-Linux system in production since leaving that company.

i had a solaris workstation on my desk from 2000 to 2005 and we had an industrial fridge size IBM pseries running AIX to run big linear programming problems on. You could not run linux or BSD on those machines and you could not get close to the performance of those machines with intel CPUs. We also had an itanium HP box for a while, running Digital UNIX.

We&#x27;ve used Solaris on x86_64 for very long, until Oracle effectively shut it down, as it was best platform to run high performance JVM jobs. Much more predictable and observable than on Linux.<p>But later Oracle shell out JVM&#x2F;Solaris integration&#x2F;QA team, and shortly after that discontinued Solaris for new hardware completely.<p>Linux it is now.

AIX<p>Luckily it had bash, so it felt like a Linux system for my scripts. There is a Command to enumerate all the hardware running on it, I remember running that command to see what was assigned to the LPAR the Aix instance was running on. It took 3 minutes to run and complete :)<p>So yeah, a mainframe. Twlco. IBM obviously. It was used as a massive Oracle database.

I&#x27;ve seen huge AIX installations maintained on contract by IAM at financial institutions.

Oracle database are still heavily deployed Oracle servers, with SPARC processors, running Solaris. While Oracle database run very well on RedHat, or Oracle Linux, Solaris really is the default platform.

A friend has his own computer business, and some of his work involves tending to AIX systems. I don&#x27;t remember now what his AIX customers use their machines for, but one might have been a biology lab.

IRIX, at my first student job at my university.<p>Most servers were already Linux&#x2F;x86 based at the time (2012), but I vividly remember SSHing to that one machine where things felt just... different.

HP Unix over serial terminals in the late 90&#x27;s and early 00&#x27;s. A few Solaris environments en the early 10&#x27;s. After that, just Linux and FreeBSD.

ORCL HW business increased YoY by 11% in the last earnings release.

QNX. Technically they are not unices…

In my previous job (mid-2010s) I encountered a ton of AIX and Solaris, mostly at very large banks.

Yep, SCO Unix that hasn&#x27;t been up dated in forever for a 1990&#x27;s text based ERP system

Yup. HP-UX on Itanium hardware. Legacy software is the reason.

At my work we’ve got a bunch of PlayStations around the office.

yep, legacy tru64, aix, solaris. big issue is ssh encryption.

I use mac which is a proprietary unix.

Not proprietary, but Oxide Computer uses a niche (open source) Unix called illumos: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;illumos.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;illumos.org&#x2F;</a>

Solaris is used in life-critical environments, like for example medical systems or energetics. Anything that&#x27;s absolutely life critical and must run for thousands of days without rebooting. And it&#x27;s really nice for running software because of its advanced features like the runtime linker, zones containerization and fault management architecure features like SMF. It&#x27;s awesome software on awesome hardware.