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The Logo

There's meaning to the logo. In one of the original Softway manuals there was an explanation about the pyramid and what it means.

The logo was placed on numerous items (shirts, hats, pens, cards, tools) and was also incorporated into the box design for OpenNT and Interix.

/dev/r+d

Do you remember this filesystem? It was part of Interix up to the 2.2 release. It was a virtual filesytem listing the R+D Team members that worked on the subsystem and utilities. Each file in the directory was a name and each file was set with the start date and end date for R+D members working on Interix. Microsoft removed it when Interix was bought because they deemed it to be an Easter Egg.

The /dev/r+d originally had the following list (implemented 16/Oct/1997 for the 2.1 release). Note that all times were set for 09:00 EST or EDT, or 09:00 PST:

• Stephe, 26/Sept/95, to MS, then Optaros, then a startup, now contracting
• Jason, 26/Sept/95, went to MS
• John, 11/May/96, went to RIM
• Mark, 7/May/96, went to MS, then Interop, now BlueCoat
• Jim, 24/Aug/96, went to MS
• Rodney, 24/August/96, went to Sendmail, then Interop
• Yan, 3/Sept/96, some SF job
• Doug, 12/Nov/96, went to Sendmail, then to BlueCoat
• Donn, 12/March/97, went to MS
• james, 16/June/97 (yes, spelled with a small 'j') To MS then retired
• Bruce, 11/Aug/97, went ?, currently at MS (Monad)
• Glenn, 11/Sept/97, went to RedHat, now at HP
• Jeff, 11/Sept/97, went to MS

There are some other entries that I still need to look up.

What's in a name?

In spring 1996 version 1.0 of OpenNT was shipped by Softway Systems. The OpenNT name played on the "NT" (New Technology) name and on "Open" from the open standards (such as POSIX and SPEC1170/SUS). This name choice had nothing to do with OpenBSD, as is sometimes rumoured. The last release with the name OpenNT was version 2.1.

Microsoft wanted to drop the "NT" name with its OS in 1998. It had special rights with Northern Telecom (now Nortel) to use "NT". So Softway needed to follow this lead and OpenNT needed to be renamed. The Interix name comes from a combination of "interoperability" and "Unix". The first release from Softway with the Interix name was version 2.2. Microsoft had a release of Interix 2.2 that was slightly different from the Softway release.

Name that machine

All of the development machines in the Softway domain were named after horses. This is the reason types of horses appeared in notes and when strings was run on utilities.

Web serving

OpenNT 2.0 ran the Unix version of Apache on Windows long before Apache had made a Windows port. Softway's web pages ran Apache on OpenNT/Interix. The speed tests (on similar hardware) was comparable to other Unix systems and was much faster than IIS.

BOF's

The first BOF for Interix was held at the 1997 Usenix.

login;

Two articles in the magazine login; on Interix.