Interactive Systems Corporation (styled INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation, abbreviated ISC) was a US-based software company and the first vendor of the Unix operating system outside AT&T, operating from Santa Monica, CA.
ISC's 1977 offering, IS/1, was a Version 6 Unix variant enhanced for office automation for the PDP-11. IS/3 and IS/5 were enhanced versions of Unix System III and System V for PDP-11 and VAX. ISC Unix ports to the IBM PC included a variant of System III, developed under contract to IBM, known as PC/IX (Personal Computer Interactive eXecutive), with later versions branded 386/ix and finally Interactive Unix System V/386 (based on System V Release 3.2). ISC was AT&T's "Principal Publisher" for System V.4 on the Intel platform.
ISC was also involved in the development of VM/IX (Unix as a guest OS in VM/CMS), IX/360 (native Unix on the System/360) and AIX, again under contract to IBM. Several former ISC staff founded Segue Software which partnered with Lotus Development to develop the Unix version of Lotus 1-2-3 and with Peter Norton Computing to develop the Unix version of the Norton Utilities.
ISC was acquired by Eastman Kodak Company in 1988, which sold its ISC Unix operating system assets to Sun Microsystems on September 26, 1991. Kodak sold the remaining parts of ISC to SHL Systemhouse Inc in 1993. Final support for Interactive System V/386 from Sun ended on July 23, 2006.
Famous quotes containing the words systems and/or corporation:
“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)
“It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)