From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Fri, 22 Jun 2001 18:41:30 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Fri, 22 Jun 2001 18:41:21 -0400 Received: from pcow029o.blueyonder.co.uk ([195.188.53.123]:4108 "EHLO blueyonder.co.uk") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id convert rfc822-to-8bit; Fri, 22 Jun 2001 18:41:07 -0400 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII From: Alan Chandler To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Microsoft and Xenix. Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 23:41:01 +0100 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.2.3] Cc: Rob Landley MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Message-Id: Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org I am not subscribed to the list, but I scan the archives and saw the following. Please cc e-mail me in followups. >Rob Landley (landley@webofficenow.com) wrote ... >In late '79 early '80, they heard the rumors that IBM was pondering a PC, > and Paul Allen went "any real computer will run Unix", so they got a >license from AT&T and ported the sucker, calling it "Xenix". (MS was a >porting house, I hope the following adds a more direct perspective on this, as I was a user at the time. I was working (and still am) for a UK computer systems integrator called Logica. One of our departments sold and supported Xenix (as distributor for Microsoft? - all the manuals had Logica on the covers although there was at least some mention of Microsoft inside) in the UK. At the time it ONLY ran on PDP 11's and I used it to build a configuration management system (on top of SCCS) for the telemetry product that I was responsible for. I acquired Xenix for my department in 1984 It was more like (can't remember exactly when) 1985/1986 that Xenix got ported to the IBM PC. I remember because we were evaluating software to use for our telemetry workstations (which previously had been using expensive special graphics hardware and we were trying to see if we could use a PC instead) and I was comparing Xenix, GEM (remember that - for a time it looked like it might be ahead of windows) and Microsoft Windows v 1 . We chose Windows in the end for its graphics capability although by the time we started development it was up to v2 and we were using 286's (this was 1987/88). ... >Xenix was unloaded on the Santa-Cruz operation almost >immediately, Logica sold out its Xenix operation to Santa-Cruz around 1987 (definately before October 1987) because we couldn't afford the costs of developing the product (which makes me think that we had bought it out from Microsoft - at least in the UK). By then we had switched our PDP 11s to System V (I also remember BUYING an editor called "emacs" for use on it:-) ). -- Alan - alan@chandlerfamily.org.uk http://www.chandlerfamily.org.uk