With the changes taking place across Eastern Europe, our sister publication Unigram.X found two Unix groups particularly keen to tell the world of their existence. The Soviet Unix Users Group was founded eight years ago by 12 organisations. The first industrial installations of Unix showed up in 1984 running on the illegal copies of DEC’s PDP-11 that were a cornerstone of the Comecon countries’ unified range, and all initial copies of the operating system are believed to have originated from three versions of the software that found their way into the Soviet Union around that time. Local programmers developed local language versions. Now, Alexandr Fridman, director of the Soviet User Group says, Santa Cruz Operation’s Xenix is by far the most popular version of Unix over there, primarily for historical reasons – Santa Cruz Xenix has been quite widely run on personal computers and has often been migrated onto other machines. A newcomer to the user community is the Romanian Unix Users Group, set up just a couple of months ago. Now with 25 members, id is chaired by Liviu Iftode of the Bucharest-based Infec Software Group. The most widely used Unix-alike in Romania is known as U. U, derived from a copy of Berkeley Software Development 2.9, which came to Romania from an East European company back in 1985, was developed for use on the copies of the PDP-11 and on personal computers. There is now a version available known as U/DOS, which is both Unix and MS-DOS-compatible according to Iftode. Iftode himself cut down a version of Berkeley 4.3 Unix specially for personal computers and teaches Unix in Bucharest, while the small private company that he works for develops Unix, MS-DOS and database applications, and does turnkey computer-aided design solutions for industry and business.
