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Apollo Domain/OS could emulate both BSD and System V, as well as support its own very different shell command set.

One of the ways it did this was that filesystem symlinks could reference the environment variable that specified what OS emulation you wanted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain/OS

https://jim.rees.org/apollo-archive/



Pyramid Technology Corporation 90x RISC-based minicomputer ran OSx, which supported BSD and System V at the same time in parallel universes, and had patented "conditional symbolic links" to support dynamically switching between the two by changing an environment variable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link#Variable_symboli...

>Pyramid Technology's OSx Operating System implemented conditional symbolic links which pointed to different locations depending on which universe a program was running in. The universes supported were AT&T's SysV.3 and the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD 4.3). For example: if the ps command was run in the att universe, then the symbolic link for the directory /bin would point to /.attbin and the program /.attbin/ps would be executed. Whereas if the ps command was run in the ucb universe, then /bin would point to /.ucbbin and /.ucbbin/ps would be executed. Similar Conditional Symbolic Links were also created for other directories such as /lib, /usr/lib, /usr/include.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_Technology

...And the hardware wasn't all that reliable either!

http://art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/gymble-roulette.html

At least you could run Space Invaders on the system console while it was down waiting for repairs.




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