Microsoft and Xenix.

Microsoft and Xenix.

[Alan Chandler]

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

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Rob Landley]

On Friday 22 June 2001 18:41, Alan Chandler wrote:
> I am not subscribed to the list, but I scan the archives and saw the
> following.  Please cc e-mail me in followups.

I've had several requests to start a mailing list on this, actually...  Might 
do so in a bit...

> 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

I don't suppose you have any of those manuals still lying around?

> It was more like (can't remember exactly when) 1985/1986 that Xenix got
> ported to the IBM PC.

Sure.  Before that the PC didn't have enough Ram.  Dos 2.0 was preparing the 
dos user base for the day when the PC -would- have enough ram.

Stuff Paul Allen set in motion while he was in charge of the technical side 
of MS still had some momentum when he left.  Initially, Microsoft's 
partnership with SCO was more along the lines of outsourcing development and 
partnering with people who knew Unix.  But without Allen rooting for it, 
Xenix gradually stopped being strategic.  Gates allowed his company to be led 
around by the nose by IBM, and sucked into the whole SAA/SNA thing (which DOS 
was the bottom tier of along with a bunch of IBM big iron, and which OS/2 
emerged from as an upgrade path bringing IBM mainframe technology to 
higher-end PCs.)

IBM had a unix, AIX, which had more or less emerged from the early RISC 
research (the 701 project?  Lemme grab my notebook...)

Ok, SAA/SNA was "Systems Application Architecture" and "Systems Network 
Architecture", which was launched coinciding with the big PS/2 announcement 
on April 2, 1987.  (models 50, 60, and 80.)  The SAA/SNA push also extended 
through the System/370 and AS400 stuff too.  (I think 370's the mainframe and 
AS400 is the minicomputer, but I'd have to look it up.  One of them (AS400?) 
had a database built into the OS.  Interestingly, this is where SQL 
originated (my notes say SQL came from the System/370 but I have to 
double-check that, I thought the AS400 was the one with the built in 
database?).  In either case, it was first ported to the PC as part of SAA.  
We also got the acronym "API" from IBM about this time.)  Dos 4.0 was new, it 
added 723 meg disks, EMS bundled into the OS rather than an add-on (the 
Lotus-Intel-Microsoft Expanded Memory Specification), and "DOSShell" which 
conformed to the SAA graphical user interface guidelines.  (Think an 
extremely primitive version of midnight commander.)

The PS/2 model 70/80 (desktop/tower versions of same thing) were IBM's first 
386 based PC boxes, which came with either DOS 3.3, DOS 4.0, OS/2 (1.0), or 
AIX.

AIX was NOT fully SAA/SNA compliant, since Unix had its own standards that 
conflicted with IBM's.  Either they'd have a non-standard unix, or a non-IBM 
os.  (They kind of wound up with both, actually.)  The IBM customers who 
insisted on Unix wanted it to comply with Unix standards, and the result is 
that AIX was an outsider in the big IBM cross-platform push of the 80's, and 
was basically sidelined within IBM as a result.  It was its own little world.

skip skip skip skip (notes about boca's early days...  The PC was launched in 
August 1981, list of specs, xt, at, specs for PS/2 models 25/30, 50, 70/80, 
and the "pc convertable" which is a REALLY ugly laptop.)

Here's what I'm looking for:

AIX was first introduced for the IBM RT/PC in 1986, which came out of the 
early RISC research.  It was ported to PS/2 and S/370 by SAA, and was based 
on unix SVR2.  (The book didn't specify whether the original version or the 
version ported to SAA was based on SVR2, I'm guessing both were.)

AIX was "not fully compliant" with SAA due to established and conflicting 
unix standards it had to be complant with, and was treated as a second class 
citizen by IBM because of this.  It was still fairly hosed according to the 
rest of the unix world, but IBM mostly bent standards rather than breaking 
them.

Hmmm...  Notes on the history of shareware (pc-write/bob wallace/quiicksoft, 
pc-file/pc-calc/jim button/buttonware, pc-talk/andrew flugelman, apparently 
the chronological order is andrew-jim-bob, and bob came up with the name 
"shareware" because "freeware" was a trademark of Headlands Press, Inc...)  
Notes on the IBM Risc System 6000 launch out of a book by Jim Hoskins (which 
is where micro-channel came from, and also had one of the first cd-rom 
drives, scsi based, 380 ms access time, 150k/second, with a caddy.)  Notes on 
the specifications of the 8080 and 8085 processors, plus the Z80

Sorry, that risc thing was the 801 project led by John Cocke, named after the 
building it was in and started in 1975.

Ah, here's the rest of it:

The IBM Person Computer RT (Risc Technology) was launched in January 1986 
running AIX.  The engineers (in Austin) whent on for the second generation 
Risc System 6000 (the RS/6000) with AIX version 3, launched February 15 1990.
The acronym "POWER" stands for Performance Optimized WIth Enhanced Risc.

Then my notes diverge into the history of ethernet and token ring (IEEE 802.3 
and 802.5, respectively.  The nutshell is that ethernet was a commodity and 
token ring was IBM only, and commodity out evolves proprietary every time.  
The second generation ethernet increased in speed 10x while the second 
generation token ring only increase 4x, and ethernet could mix speeds while 
token ring had to be homgeneous.  Plus ethernet moved to the "baseT" stuff 
which was just just so much more reliable and convenient, and still cheaper 
even if you had to purchase hubs because it was commodity.)

> 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

Ummm...  GEM was the Geos stuff?  (Yeah I remember it, I haven't researched 
it yet though...)

> 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).

I used windows 2.0 briefly.  It was black and white and you could watch the 
individual pixels appear on the screen as it drew the fonts.  (It looked 
about like somebody writing with a pen.  Really fast for writing with a pen, 
but insanely slow by most other standards.  Scrolling the screen was an 
excuse to take a sip of beverage du jour.)

The suckiness of windows through the 80's has several reasons.  The first 
apple windowing system Gates saw was the LISA, -before- the macintosh, and 
they actually had a pre-release mac prototype (since they were doing 
application software for it) to clone.  Yet it took them 11 years to get it 
right.

In part this was because PC graphics hardware really sucked.  CGA, hercules, 
EGA...  Painful.  Black and white frame buffers pumped through an 8 mhz ISA 
bus.  (Even the move to 16 bit bus with the AT didn't really help matters too 
much.)

In part, when Paul Allen left, Microsoft's in-house technical staff just 
disintegrated.  (Would YOU work for a company where marketing had absolute 
power?)  The scraps of talent they had left mostly followed the agenda set by 
IBM (DOS 4/5, OS/2 1.0/1.1).  A lot of other stuff (like the AIX work) got 
outsourced.

Windows was Gates' pet project (I suspect an ego thing with steve jobs may 
have been involved a bit, but they BOTH knew that the stuff from Xerox parc 
was the future).  He didn't want to outsource it, but the in-house resources 
available to work on it were just pathetic.

There are a couple good histories of windows (with dates, detailed feature 
lists, and screen shots of the various versions) available online.  And if 
you're discussing windows, you not only have to compare it with the Macintosh 
but at least take a swipe at the Amiga and Atari ST as well.  And OS/2's 
presentation manager development, and of course the early X days (The first 
version of X came out of MIT in 1984, the year the macintosh launched.  
Unfortunatley in 1988 X got caught in a standards committe and development 
STOPPED for the next ten years.  Development finally got back in gear with 
the XFree86 guys told X Open where it could stick its new license a year or 
two back and finally decided to forge ahead on their own, and they've been 
making up for lost time ever since but they've had a LOT of ground to cover.  
Using 3d accelerator cards to play MPEG video streams is only now becoming 
feasable to do under X.  And it SHOULD be possible to do that through a 
100baseT network, let alone gigabit, but the layering's all wrong...)

> 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:-) ).

That would be the X version of emacs.  And there's the explanation for the 
split between GNU and X emacs: it got forked and the closed-source version 
had a vew  years of divergent development before opening back up, by which 
point it was very different to reconcile the two code bases.

Such is the fate of BSD licensed code, it seems.  At least when there's money 
in it, anyway...

And THAT happy experience is why Richard Stallman stopped writing code for a 
while and instead started writing licenses.  The GPL 1.0 decended directly 
from that (and 2.0 from real world use/experience/users' comments in the 
field)

(Yes, I HAVE been doing a lot of research.  I think I'll head down to the UT 
library again this afternoon, actually...)

Rob

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Michael Alan Dorman]

Rob Landley <landley@webofficenow.com> writes:
> That would be the X version of emacs.  And there's the explanation
> for the split between GNU and X emacs: it got forked and the
> closed-source version had a vew years of divergent development
> before opening back up, by which point it was very different to
> reconcile the two code bases.

No, sorry, wrong, for at least a couple of reasons reasons:

 1) XEmacs, being constrained to be under the same license (GPL) as
    its progenitor, GNU Emacs, could never have been closed-source.

 2) Lucid Emacs, the version of Emacs that becamse XEmacs, was not
    started until ca. 1992

    I refer you to http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html for
    documentation---JWZ was Mr. Lucid Emacs for quite a time.

In 1987, there are any number of things that it could have been---I'd
guess either Unipress Emacs or perhaps Gosling Emacs.

Mike.

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Rob Landley]

On Saturday 23 June 2001 20:13, Michael Alan Dorman wrote:
> Rob Landley <landley@webofficenow.com> writes:
> > That would be the X version of emacs.  And there's the explanation
> > for the split between GNU and X emacs: it got forked and the
> > closed-source version had a vew years of divergent development
> > before opening back up, by which point it was very different to
> > reconcile the two code bases.
>
> No, sorry, wrong, for at least a couple of reasons reasons:

I've had this pointed out to me by about five people now.  Apparently there's 
more to emacs than I thought...  (Considering its kitchen sink icon, this 
should come as a suprise to no one...)

>     I refer you to http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html for
>     documentation---JWZ was Mr. Lucid Emacs for quite a time.

Thanks for the link.  I've also been pointed to xemacs.org.  Have to check 
out both next time I plug this laptop in to the net.  (And I apparently need 
to set up a mailing list on this, since the number of people asking me to do 
so has now hit double digits...)

I'll post a thing here when I do that so we can move at least most of this 
discussion off linux-kernel.

> In 1987, there are any number of things that it could have been---I'd
> guess either Unipress Emacs or perhaps Gosling Emacs.

I sort of know about gosling's version.  (It's mentioned in Stallman's 
history of emacs on gnu.org...)  Interesting how the same people keep popping 
up as you move from topic to topic.  (Licklidder wasn't just a bigwig behind 
arpanet, he also kicked off project mac at MIT.  Doug McIllroy who was one of 
the half-dozen figures behind the unix launch at bell labs came to BTL after 
working on project whirlwind at Lincoln Labs (I.E. MIT.)  And of course Ken 
Olsen, hotshot at whirlwind behind core memory, creator of the memory test 
computer that (when donated to marvin minsky's computing lab) virtually 
created the whole "Hacker" phenomenon, whose wrote a paper as a graduate 
student suggesting the use of transistors in computers which convinced IBM to 
build the first fully transistorized computer (I -THINK-, timeline still a 
bit fuzzy there to  claim "first", may just have been first commercially 
shipping one), and then of course went off to found Digital after tx-0...

Hmmm...  I should probably corner Alan Cox at some event and ask him about 
his Amiga days.  (And I DID track down Commodore guru Jim Butterfield last 
year, he was living in Canada at the time.  Just got back into computing 
after years with cataracts obstructing his vision, apparently...)

Rob

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Jeff Dike]

landley@webofficenow.com said:
> Licklidder wasn't just a bigwig behind  arpanet, he also kicked off
> project mac at MIT.

You're right, but you could at least spell his name right - J. C. R. Licklider.

		Jeff (who was his last undergraduate thesis supervisee at MIT)

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Rob Landley]

On Sunday 24 June 2001 21:45, Jeff Dike wrote:
> landley@webofficenow.com said:
> > Licklidder wasn't just a bigwig behind  arpanet, he also kicked off
> > project mac at MIT.
>
> You're right, but you could at least spell his name right - J. C. R.
> Licklider.
>
> 		Jeff (who was his last undergraduate thesis supervisee at MIT)

What can I say, I'm bad with names?

This is why I'm so careful to write them down accurately in my notebook, 
which is at home.  (I have some stuff typed into a text file on my laptop, 
but it's easier to drag out a notebook and jot something down then to wait 30 
seconds for my dell monstrosity's bios to boot up, open a window, cd to the 
approprite directory, edit a text file, then shut everything down again.

I should probably get a palm pilot one of these days...

Rob

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[John Adams]

On Saturday 23 June 2001 10:07, Rob Landley wrote:
> Here's what I'm looking for:
>
> AIX was first introduced for the IBM RT/PC in 1986, which came out of the
> early RISC research.  It was ported to PS/2 and S/370 by SAA, and was
> based on unix SVR2.  (The book didn't specify whether the original
> version or the version ported to SAA was based on SVR2, I'm guessing both
> were.)

You are partially correct.  AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) was built 
by the Boston office of Interactive Systems under contract to IBM.  We had 
a maximum of 17 people in the effort which shipped on the RT in January 
1986.

Prior to that time, Interactive Systems had produced a port of System III 
running on the PC/XT called PC/IX which was sold via IBM.  I used PC/IX to 
produce the software only floating point code in the first version of AIX.

johna

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Rob Landley]

On Saturday 23 June 2001 20:49, John Adams wrote:
> On Saturday 23 June 2001 10:07, Rob Landley wrote:
> > Here's what I'm looking for:
> >
> > AIX was first introduced for the IBM RT/PC in 1986, which came out of the
> > early RISC research.  It was ported to PS/2 and S/370 by SAA, and was
> > based on unix SVR2.  (The book didn't specify whether the original
> > version or the version ported to SAA was based on SVR2, I'm guessing both
> > were.)
>
> You are partially correct.  AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) was built
> by the Boston office of Interactive Systems under contract to IBM.  We had
> a maximum of 17 people in the effort which shipped on the RT in January
> 1986.

Ah.  I got the above out of a book in the UT library.  (I have the name 
written down in my notebook...  Um, possibly "IBM PS/2, a business 
perspective" by Jim Hoskins, or more likely "IBM RISC 6000, a business 
perspective" also by Jim Hoskins.  I have no idea who Jim Hoskins is.)

Obviously It's better to have somebody who was actually there.  Mind if I bug 
you offline about this?  (Or better yet, convince you to join the mailing 
list I'll be creating this afternoon...)

> Prior to that time, Interactive Systems had produced a port of System III
> running on the PC/XT called PC/IX which was sold via IBM.  I used PC/IX to
> produce the software only floating point code in the first version of AIX.

Cool.  I know there were several nebulous versions of unix available for the 
PC.  (I don't know when coherent was introduced but it was around in 89...  
And Xenix was always sort of floating around...  Considering that IBM also 
had access to Xenix (if it wanted it), that's at least three versions of Unix 
IBM could have put on the PC.

What do you want to bet no two of them ran the same binaries? :)

> johna

Rob

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Eric W. Biederman]

Rob Landley <landley@webofficenow.com> writes:

> Ummm...  GEM was the Geos stuff?  (Yeah I remember it, I haven't researched 
> it yet though...)


GEM was a gui from Digital Research I believe.
Geoworks/Geos was a seperate entity.  

It's been a long time since I looked but they both run fine under
dosemu...

Eric

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Rob Landley]

On Saturday 23 June 2001 22:47, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Rob Landley <landley@webofficenow.com> writes:
> > Ummm...  GEM was the Geos stuff?  (Yeah I remember it, I haven't
> > researched it yet though...)
>
> GEM was a gui from Digital Research I believe.
> Geoworks/Geos was a seperate entity.

Ah, the DR-DOS answer to dosshell/windows.  Cool.  (I used Dr. Dos byt never 
tried its gui.)

I know the geos had nothing to do with digital, it started as a windowing GUI 
for the commodore 64, if you can believe that...

> It's been a long time since I looked but they both run fine under
> dosemu...

I don't suppose you've got reference to literature or some such?  I'd love to 
work this into my huge obnoxious data tree I'm building...

Rob

[OT] Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Daniel Phillips]

On Sunday 24 June 2001 12:36, Rob Landley wrote:
> On Saturday 23 June 2001 22:47, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> > GEM was a gui from Digital Research I believe.
> > Geoworks/Geos was a seperate entity.
>
> Ah, the DR-DOS answer to dosshell/windows.  Cool.  (I used Dr. Dos byt
> never tried its gui.)

GEM had its moment of glory when Xerox used it for the gui of Ventura 
Publisher.

--
Daniel

[OT] Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Mon, Jun 25, 2001 at 12:20:40AM +0200, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> On Sunday 24 June 2001 12:36, Rob Landley wrote:
> > On Saturday 23 June 2001 22:47, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> > > GEM was a gui from Digital Research I believe.
> > > Geoworks/Geos was a seperate entity.
> >
> > Ah, the DR-DOS answer to dosshell/windows.  Cool.  (I used Dr. Dos byt
> > never tried its gui.)
> 
> GEM had its moment of glory when Xerox used it for the gui of Ventura 
> Publisher.

GEM (a slight variation) was also providing GUI on Atari ST.  At that
time it was heavily beating pants off from anything M$ was able to
cobble together on nominally much faster machines.

   Michal

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Chris Meadors]

On Sun, 24 Jun 2001, Rob Landley wrote:

> I know the geos had nothing to do with digital, it started as a windowing GUI
> for the commodore 64, if you can believe that...

Not only can I belive it, but I was going to bring it up the first time
GEOS was mentioned.  Having only used Macs (in school) for file operations
(I had loaded games off a TSR-80 datasette).  I couldn't follow
copying/deleting/renaming files by typing commands when my family finally
got me a C64.  So I relied heavily on GEOS.  I even got one of those touch
pads to move the cursor around the screen.

When my dad finally got a PC in 1991 it had MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 on
it.  I didn't like Windows too much, but still found DOS awkward (still
using Macs in school).  I started using dosshell a lot for file
operations.  But when I saw an ad for GEOS in a computer mag. I was so
happy.  I ended up using that for a while.  But more and more programs
required Windows, and that made me mad.

There was one book that totally changed my life.  I can't remember the
correct title, but it was something to the effect of Secrets to the DOS
Gurus.  After reading that book, I fell in love with the command line
interface.  Everything started making sense.

Somewhere along the line, I think 1994 I started working for the Maryland
state government at a Healt Department.  They were running Xenix (SCO, the
2 names were interchanged a lot) on a 386.  A few of the "important"
people had serial lines run to their Win 3.1 PCs where they'd use Telix to
run the database programs on the Xenix box.

As I watched people work on in Xenix I recognized a lot of the commands I
had picked up using the Delphi online service.  I had a neighbor that
showed me some stuff I could do if I chose the Exit to Shell option.

In 1995 still working for the Health Department I got to go to my first
trade show, FOSE.  I met and heavily impressed a lot of booth workers.
One such booth was Microsoft.  I was invited to participate in their beta
program for the upcoming Windows 95 (I was one of the "lucky" people who
didn't have to pay for their betas).

I used the Win95 betas for a while.  But something happened that year.  I
got a Linux Unleashed book from SAMS.  It included a copy of Slackware.  I
installed that along side my Win95, and when I saw how fast Doom loaded I
was in love.  I vowed that on August 24, 1995 I would delete Windows from
my machine and never use it again.  Well I can't say that I have held
complete faithful to that vow, but I have had Linux on my machine ever
since then.  Now my computer is Windows free and has been for a year and a
half.

Okay, I brushed on GEOS, Microsoft, Xenix, and even Linux.  So I'm as on
topic as the rest of this thread.  I just have never told my story on l-k,
and this seemed a good place to put a little of it in.  :)

-Chris
-- 
Two penguins were walking on an iceberg.  The first penguin said to the
second, "you look like you are wearing a tuxedo."  The second penguin
said, "I might be..."                         --David Lynch, Twin Peaks

Re: Microsoft and Xenix - Now there's a mailing list for this discussion.

[Rob Landley]

On Sunday 24 June 2001 18:41, Chris Meadors wrote:

> Okay, I brushed on GEOS, Microsoft, Xenix, and even Linux.  So I'm as on
> topic as the rest of this thread.  I just have never told my story on l-k,
> and this seemed a good place to put a little of it in.  :)
>
> -Chris

I just created a mailing list for this discussion attached to one of my 
existing sourceforge projects.  It's penguicon-comphist@lists.sourceforge.net.

This is sort of an abuse of sourceforge, but then again the project I 
attached it to is to put together a Linux convention in Austin in 2003 and 
we'll probably have at least one panel on computer history, and most likely a 
BOF too, so it's SORT of on topic. :)

To subscribe, apparently you go here:

http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/penguicon-comphist

(I've cc'd the people who've emailed me about this topic so far, but haven't 
subscribed anybody.  If you're interested, you have to do it yourself.)

Rob

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[William T Wilson]

On Sun, 24 Jun 2001, Rob Landley wrote:

> I know the geos had nothing to do with digital, it started as a
> windowing GUI for the commodore 64, if you can believe that...

I've actually got a copy, but it's for the Apple // :}

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[asmith]

Hi,

I first used  Unix on a PDP11/44 whilst studying for my Computer Engineering
degree at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.  I think they and Queen
Margaret
College, London were the first folk running Unix version 6 outside Bell Labs.
If anyone knows where Patrick O'Callaghan is now (ask him).

Another Unix like OS was Cromemco Cromix running on  bank switched Z80 S-100
kit.(later 68000).

I then used SCO Xenix 286 on early Compaq 286 PC's.   Companies like Chase,
Specialix and Stallion grew up as suppliers of intelligent RS-232 boards.  As
a result of all these Xenix machines, Wyse sold a hell of a lot of WY50
terminals.

Who remembers terminals from Lear Siegler and Beehive.   All this was before
networking came about.  Then the Chase Iolan to connect these same Wyse
terminals to the SCO box but through one bit of co-ax instead of multi-core
cables.  Also you could get 100m  away from your SCO box  with co-ax.

--
Andrew Smith in Edinburgh

On Sun, 24 Jun
2001, William T Wilson wrote:

> On Sun, 24 Jun 2001, Rob Landley wrote:
>
> > I know the geos had nothing to do with digital, it started as a
> > windowing GUI for the commodore 64, if you can believe that...
>
> I've actually got a copy, but it's for the Apple // :}
>
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
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>

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Robert J.Dunlop]

Hi,


On Mon, Jun 25, 2001 at 06:27:24PM +0100, asmith@14inverleith.freeserve.co.uk wrote:
> I first used  Unix on a PDP11/44 whilst studying for my Computer Engineering
> degree at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.  I think they and Queen Margaret
> College, London were the first folk running Unix version 6 outside Bell Labs.

Hey! Don't forget UKC ;-) Cut my teeth on pdp11 v6 and VAXen BSD 4.1 once I got
away from the dreaded EMAS. Edinbugh Multi-Access System was the pitts.

> I then used SCO Xenix 286 on early Compaq 286 PC's.   Companies like Chase,
> Specialix and Stallion grew up as suppliers of intelligent RS-232 boards.  As
> a result of all these Xenix machines, Wyse sold a hell of a lot of WY50
> terminals.

Great days.  The business was so incestuous.  We seemed to swap engineers on a
regular basis.  Hacking drivers without kernel source and documentation that
always seemed at least a release behind.  Still keep a WY60 manual on my book
shelf and always regret losing the VT100 one.

> Who remembers terminals from Lear Siegler and Beehive.   All this was before
> networking came about.  Then the Chase Iolan to connect these same Wyse
> terminals to the SCO box but through one bit of co-ax instead of multi-core
> cables.  Also you could get 100m  away from your SCO box  with co-ax.

And the trouble we had explaining to customers that they had to buy a separate
SCO TCP/IP networking package just to hook up the IOLAN.



-- 
        Bob Dunlop
        rjd@xyzzy.clara.co.uk
        www.xyzzy.clara.co.uk

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Eric W. Biederman]

Rob Landley <landley@webofficenow.com> writes:

> On Saturday 23 June 2001 22:47, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> > Rob Landley <landley@webofficenow.com> writes:
> > > Ummm...  GEM was the Geos stuff?  (Yeah I remember it, I haven't
> > > researched it yet though...)
> >
> > GEM was a gui from Digital Research I believe.
> > Geoworks/Geos was a seperate entity.
> 
> Ah, the DR-DOS answer to dosshell/windows.  Cool.  (I used Dr. Dos byt never 
> tried its gui.)

Actually I believe GEM predates DR-DOS, and except for being
made by the same company I don't think they were ever related.

Eric

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Juan Quintela]

>>>>> "rob" == Rob Landley <landley@webofficenow.com> writes:

rob> On Saturday 23 June 2001 22:47, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>> Rob Landley <landley@webofficenow.com> writes:
>> > Ummm...  GEM was the Geos stuff?  (Yeah I remember it, I haven't
>> > researched it yet though...)
>> 
>> GEM was a gui from Digital Research I believe.
>> Geoworks/Geos was a seperate entity.

rob> Ah, the DR-DOS answer to dosshell/windows.  Cool.  (I used Dr. Dos byt never 
rob> tried its gui.)

Nope.  GEM is older that dosshell, if I remember correctly, dosshell
appeared with dos 4.x, and GEM was there with DOS 3.x (was x = 22?).
I also had DOS+ from Digital Research in my Amstrad PC1512.

Later, Juan.

-- 
In theory, practice and theory are the same, but in practice they 
are different -- Larry McVoy

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Kai Henningsen]

landley@webofficenow.com (Rob Landley)  wrote on 23.06.01 in <01062310075401.00696@localhost.localdomain>:

> on April 2, 1987.  (models 50, 60, and 80.)  The SAA/SNA push also extended
> through the System/370 and AS400 stuff too.  (I think 370's the mainframe
> and AS400 is the minicomputer, but I'd have to look it up.  One of them
> (AS400?) had a database built into the OS.  Interestingly, this is where SQL
> originated (my notes say SQL came from the System/370 but I have to
> double-check that, I thought the AS400 was the one with the built in
> database?).

The AS/400 is still going strong. It's a virtual machine based on a  
relational database (among other things), mostly programmed in COBOL (I  
think the C compiler has sizeof(void*) == 16 or something like that, so  
you can put a database position in that pointer), it doesn't know the  
difference between disk and memory (memory is *really* only a cache), and  
these days it's usually running on PowerPC hardware.

ISTR there's a gcc port for the AS/400. Oh, and it does have normal BSD  
Sockets. These days, it's often sold as a web server.

Main customer base seems to be medium large businesses and banks.

> Lotus-Intel-Microsoft Expanded Memory Specification), and "DOSShell" which
> conformed to the SAA graphical user interface guidelines.

Nope, the text user interface guidelines, a related but not the same  
beast. That's where F1 == Help is from, by the way.

In fact, the user interface part of SAA was (is?) called CUA. And many IBM  
text mode interfaces more or less follow it, including OS/400 (the os of  
the AS/400). Once upon a time, I had the specs for CUA.

> The PS/2 model 70/80 (desktop/tower versions of same thing) were IBM's first
> 386 based PC boxes, which came with either DOS 3.3, DOS 4.0, OS/2 (1.0), or
> AIX.

The first 386 PCs where not from IBM, by the way. Was it Compaq?

> AIX was NOT fully SAA/SNA compliant,

AFAICT, nothing ever was fully SAA compliant, though some systems were  
more compliant than others.

> Hmmm...  Notes on the history of shareware (pc-write/bob wallace/quiicksoft,
> pc-file/pc-calc/jim button/buttonware, pc-talk/andrew flugelman, apparently
> the chronological order is andrew-jim-bob, and bob came up with the name
> "shareware" because "freeware" was a trademark of Headlands Press, Inc...)

That may be, but I believe the *concept* was invented in 1980 by Bill  
Basham, with the Apple ][ DOS replacement Diversi-DOS (which was the most  
popular of many versions to increase disk speed by about a factor of 5). I  
still remember discussions how copying this stuff was actually the right  
thing to do. Seems he's still in business as "Diversified Software  
Research", http://www.divtune.com/.

> running AIX.  The engineers (in Austin) whent on for the second generation
> Risc System 6000 (the RS/6000) with AIX version 3, launched February 15
> 1990. The acronym "POWER" stands for Performance Optimized WIth Enhanced
> Risc.

The PowerPC was split off from the POWER architecture, and then the POWER  
stuff was turned into the high end above PowerPC (with system prices about  
a factor of ten higher as the lower bound).

IBM developed a version of OS/2 2.0 for the PowerPC, but *never* marketed  
it - you could buy it if you knew the right number, but they never spent a  
single cent on advertizing - by the time it was done, IBM had given up on  
OS/2. Most OS/2 fans agreed that it was killed by IBM with extremely bad  
marketing.

These days, of course Apple builds the most PowerPC machines; Motorola and  
IBM produce the chips.

> Ummm...  GEM was the Geos stuff?

No. GEM, I believe, originally came from CP/M. Most popular as the  
windowing system of the Atari ST; given that someone did a quick-hack MS- 
DOS clone to support it on the 68K, it seems fairly obvious that by that  
time, it had already been ported to MS-DOS. (GEM-DOS is the only os I know  
of that was actually worse than MS-DOS.)

Friends of mine (Gereon Steffens and Stefan Eissing) wrote a command-line  
shell and desktop replacement for the Atari that was fairly successful  
shareware for a while ... now how was it called? The CLI was Mupfel  
(German for shell is Muschel, and there was a kid's TV character who  
pronounced Muschel as Mupfel), and I think the desktop was Gemini. Another  
(Julian Reschke) wrote *the* German Atari ST book. This was a fairly  
prominent Atari ST area for a while, but somehow I never had one.

> Using 3d accelerator cards to play MPEG video streams is only now becoming
> feasable to do under X.  And it SHOULD be possible to do that through a
> 100baseT network, let alone gigabit, but the layering's all wrong...)

One might say it's time for X12, except the installed base of X11 has  
become too large.

MfG Kai

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Rob Landley]

On Monday 25 June 2001 15:23, Kai Henningsen wrote:

> The AS/400 is still going strong. It's a virtual machine based on a
> relational database (among other things), mostly programmed in COBOL (I
> think the C compiler has sizeof(void*) == 16 or something like that, so
> you can put a database position in that pointer), it doesn't know the
> difference between disk and memory (memory is *really* only a cache), and
> these days it's usually running on PowerPC hardware.
>
> ISTR there's a gcc port for the AS/400. Oh, and it does have normal BSD
> Sockets. These days, it's often sold as a web server.
>
> Main customer base seems to be medium large businesses and banks.

The AS400 seems to be based out of Austin.  We hear a lot about it around 
here...

> > Lotus-Intel-Microsoft Expanded Memory Specification), and "DOSShell"
> > which conformed to the SAA graphical user interface guidelines.
>
> Nope, the text user interface guidelines, a related but not the same
> beast. That's where F1 == Help is from, by the way.

Same overall push.  I think the distinction there is a bit nit-picking to put 
in the book, but I'll have to look it up to make sure...

> In fact, the user interface part of SAA was (is?) called CUA. And many IBM
> text mode interfaces more or less follow it, including OS/400 (the os of
> the AS/400). Once upon a time, I had the specs for CUA.

When I worked at IBM I had to program for CUA.  Ouch.  Painful memories...

How did any of this related to the "Common Desktop Environment", by the way?

> > The PS/2 model 70/80 (desktop/tower versions of same thing) were IBM's
> > first 386 based PC boxes, which came with either DOS 3.3, DOS 4.0, OS/2
> > (1.0), or AIX.
>
> The first 386 PCs where not from IBM, by the way. Was it Compaq?

It was compaq.  The "Desqpro" or some such.  That was actually an important 
turning point, Compaq basically stuck a 32 bit processor in a machine that 
was otherwise designed for a 16 bit one.  It had a 16 bit ISA bus, 8 bit 30 
pin simms that had been paired off now needed to be used in groups of 4...  
It was a painful hack from a hardware perspective.

IBM was busy trying to upgrade the memory system and bus and stuff to be a 
better platform for the 386, but the waited to long and compaq just came out 
with "a quick hack now", and everybody else started copying compaq 
(especially when IBM's alternative was patented and thus not easily 
clonable...)

With the PS/2 IBM succeeded in preventing the clones from copying them.  
Their mistake was in thinking that this was a good thing.

> > AIX was NOT fully SAA/SNA compliant,
>
> AFAICT, nothing ever was fully SAA compliant, though some systems were
> more compliant than others.

Yeah, but AIX didn't even pretend to be.  And that sidelined it within IBM in 
the late 80's in a big way.  (Up until Gerster took over and overturned 
everything.)

> > Hmmm...  Notes on the history of shareware (pc-write/bob
> > wallace/quiicksoft, pc-file/pc-calc/jim button/buttonware, pc-talk/andrew
> > flugelman, apparently the chronological order is andrew-jim-bob, and bob
> > came up with the name "shareware" because "freeware" was a trademark of
> > Headlands Press, Inc...)
>
> That may be, but I believe the *concept* was invented in 1980 by Bill

The "concept" of freeware had been around as public domain software forever.  
The homebrew club thought that way naturally about micros, and the MIT 
hackers thought that way also.

If you're saying basham invented shareware...  Maybe.  I'll have to look into 
it.  I'm just tracing back the origin of the word...

> Basham, with the Apple ][ DOS replacement Diversi-DOS (which was the most
> popular of many versions to increase disk speed by about a factor of 5). I
> still remember discussions how copying this stuff was actually the right
> thing to do. Seems he's still in business as "Diversified Software
> Research", http://www.divtune.com/.

Adding link to link pile...

> > running AIX.  The engineers (in Austin) whent on for the second
> > generation Risc System 6000 (the RS/6000) with AIX version 3, launched
> > February 15 1990. The acronym "POWER" stands for Performance Optimized
> > WIth Enhanced Risc.
>
> The PowerPC was split off from the POWER architecture, and then the POWER
> stuff was turned into the high end above PowerPC (with system prices about
> a factor of ten higher as the lower bound).

Yeah, I have to research that bit still.  I know the vague bits (the 
IBM/apple/motorola hegemony to unseat Intel with risc, conceived before Intel 
came out with the Pentium, of course...)

> IBM developed a version of OS/2 2.0 for the PowerPC, but *never* marketed
> it - you could buy it if you knew the right number, but they never spent a
> single cent on advertizing - by the time it was done, IBM had given up on
> OS/2. Most OS/2 fans agreed that it was killed by IBM with extremely bad
> marketing.

My first job out of college was working at IBM in Boca Raton florida on the 
install system for OS/2 for the power PC.  (The monster that became Feature 
Install in version 4.0 because I ported it back to Intel and cleaned it up 
until it at least ran.  It actually would have been easier to start over from 
scratch, the code base I inherited sucked to an UNBELIEVABLE degree.)

I know ALL the dirt about that project.  The CD actually had Compuserve 
Information Manager as one of the things it could install.  The whole "bonus 
pack" from 3.0 was there too.  The idea was to port the sucker to a 
microkernel ("Workplace OS") and then port that back to Intel.  Of course the 
microkernel kept changing on a weekly basis right up until the end, so no 
code on top of it was ever actually finished...  And our hardware prototypes 
changed a bit too (pineapple, etc).  And the performance of all of them just 
SUCKED compared to Intel stuff...  (We had a watcom cross-compiler that 
produced these OBSCENELY large executables...)

Don't get me started on that.

And IBM didn't give up on OS/2 until they'd done one more Intel version 
(4.0), which was unfortunately far too late to make any difference.  OS/2 for 
PPC "shipped to the shelf" (a mercy killing) at the same time IBM 
consolidated the boca site to austin texas.  (That's how I wound up in 
austin, 4 months after I arrived in boca they announced they would pay me to 
move to austin, and 4 months after THAT we did it.)

Then in Austin we did 4.0, which was kind of unpleasant because they'd 
decided on the ship schedule for it BEFORE deciding to do the site 
consolidation, and from day one we were trying to make up 4 months out of a 1 
year schedule that was pretty ambitious to begin with.  I worked my first 90 
hour week doing that.  They gave me a pager and used it between midnight and 
2 am three times in the same week.  And of course none of us were being paid 
overtime, but we were all locked in (for either 1 year or 2 years) because 
we'd have to pay back the move money otherwise (quite generous incentives, 
actually), and IBM knew it.  But a lot of people quite anyway (or took "early 
retirement" incentives, long story...)

But when the 1 year or 2 year period was up, the OS/2 development team was 
just GONE.  Bang, flush, empty parkings lot in the 900 buildings.  EVERYBODY 
left.  Most of them quit IBM.

The IBM push to Java actually started in late 1995 (during the falcon 
shutdown), and was in full swing for OS/2 4.0.  They were really trying to 
transition the OS/2 base into Java users who might not stay with OS/2 but at 
least wouldn't be locked into the Windows monopoly.  The AIX guys were doing 
the same thing, as were the AS400 and 360 guys.  IBM even produced a version 
of Java for windows 3.1, for a while.  (Because Microsoft wouldn't.)

> These days, of course Apple builds the most PowerPC machines; Motorola and
> IBM produce the chips.
>
> > Ummm...  GEM was the Geos stuff?
>
> No. GEM, I believe, originally came from CP/M. Most popular as the
> windowing system of the Atari ST; given that someone did a quick-hack MS-
> DOS clone to support it on the 68K, it seems fairly obvious that by that
> time, it had already been ported to MS-DOS. (GEM-DOS is the only os I know
> of that was actually worse than MS-DOS.)

The atari history site has a lot of info on this.  So does the CP/M museum.  
(I'll probably be putting up a links list on a web page over the next few 
days...)

> Friends of mine (Gereon Steffens and Stefan Eissing) wrote a command-line
> shell and desktop replacement for the Atari that was fairly successful
> shareware for a while ... now how was it called? The CLI was Mupfel
> (German for shell is Muschel, and there was a kid's TV character who
> pronounced Muschel as Mupfel), and I think the desktop was Gemini. Another
> (Julian Reschke) wrote *the* German Atari ST book. This was a fairly
> prominent Atari ST area for a while, but somehow I never had one.

Germany was big into the commodore 64, OS/2, the amiga, and the atari ST.  
Basically they were "anything but microsoft" even back in the 80's.  (Sheesh, 
-I- didn't start to hate Microsoft until about 1989.  Admittedly I didn't own 
my own PC until 1990.  Amiga and commodore 64 before then.  Used friends' 
PCs, though.  WWIV mods are the reason I learned C in the first place...)

> > Using 3d accelerator cards to play MPEG video streams is only now
> > becoming feasable to do under X.  And it SHOULD be possible to do that
> > through a 100baseT network, let alone gigabit, but the layering's all
> > wrong...)
>
> One might say it's time for X12, except the installed base of X11 has
> become too large.

The installed base of X11 goes through xlib, and half of it REALLY goes 
through either GTK or QT.

They're porting GTK and QT to a frame buffer.

An open-source installed base really isn't as much of a compatability 
nightmare as you'd think.  Sure you need to keep support for old APIs, but 
recompiling with "compatability" libries that translate from one APi to 
another is relatively normal and gradually porting code from one API set to 
another is a fact of life...

> MfG Kai

Rob

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Michael Meissner]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2001 at 11:16:27AM -0400, Rob Landley wrote:
> On Monday 25 June 2001 15:23, Kai Henningsen wrote:
> 
> > The AS/400 is still going strong. It's a virtual machine based on a
> > relational database (among other things), mostly programmed in COBOL (I
> > think the C compiler has sizeof(void*) == 16 or something like that, so
> > you can put a database position in that pointer), it doesn't know the
> > difference between disk and memory (memory is *really* only a cache), and
> > these days it's usually running on PowerPC hardware.
> >
> > ISTR there's a gcc port for the AS/400. Oh, and it does have normal BSD
> > Sockets. These days, it's often sold as a web server.
> >
> > Main customer base seems to be medium large businesses and banks.
> 
> The AS400 seems to be based out of Austin.  We hear a lot about it around 
> here...

Ummm, the AS/400 was based out of Rochester, Minnesota at least initially.  It
was the follow to System/3 -> System/36 -> System/38, and customers originally
programmed it in RPG-III and Cobol.  Now that AS/400's are based on special
PowerPC's, the home may have moved to Austin, which is the PowerPC/AIX center.
The AS/400 line was intended to be the mid-range system, between the mainframes
(360 -> 370 -> 3080 -> 3900 -> ???) and the PCs.

-- 
Michael Meissner, Red Hat, Inc.  (GCC group)
PMB 198, 174 Littleton Road #3, Westford, Massachusetts 01886, USA
Work:	  meissner@redhat.com		phone: +1 978-486-9304
Non-work: meissner@spectacle-pond.org	fax:   +1 978-692-4482

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Geert Uytterhoeven]

On Tue, 26 Jun 2001, Michael Meissner wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2001 at 11:16:27AM -0400, Rob Landley wrote:
> > The AS400 seems to be based out of Austin.  We hear a lot about it around 
> > here...
> 
> Ummm, the AS/400 was based out of Rochester, Minnesota at least initially.  It
> was the follow to System/3 -> System/36 -> System/38, and customers originally
> programmed it in RPG-III and Cobol.  Now that AS/400's are based on special
> PowerPC's, the home may have moved to Austin, which is the PowerPC/AIX center.
> The AS/400 line was intended to be the mid-range system, between the mainframes
> (360 -> 370 -> 3080 -> 3900 -> ???) and the PCs.

360 -> 370 -> 3080 -> 3090 -> ES/9000 -> zSeries, IIRC

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

						Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
							    -- Linus Torvalds

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Peter De Schrijver]

On Wed, Jun 27, 2001 at 10:09:41AM +0200, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Jun 2001, Michael Meissner wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 26, 2001 at 11:16:27AM -0400, Rob Landley wrote:
> > > The AS400 seems to be based out of Austin.  We hear a lot about it around 
> > > here...
> > 
> > Ummm, the AS/400 was based out of Rochester, Minnesota at least initially.  It
> > was the follow to System/3 -> System/36 -> System/38, and customers originally
> > programmed it in RPG-III and Cobol.  Now that AS/400's are based on special
> > PowerPC's, the home may have moved to Austin, which is the PowerPC/AIX center.
> > The AS/400 line was intended to be the mid-range system, between the mainframes
> > (360 -> 370 -> 3080 -> 3900 -> ???) and the PCs.
> 
> 360 -> 370 -> 3080 -> 3090 -> ES/9000 -> zSeries, IIRC
> 
 360 -> 370 -> 3080 -> 3090 -> ES/9000 -> S/390 -> zSeries ?

Peter.

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Peter Bergner]

First off, my apologies for posting this from my non-work email address.
>From my .sig below, you'll see I work for IBM, Rochester.


Rob Landley wrote:
: The AS400 seems to be based out of Austin.  We hear a lot about it around 
: here...

and...

Michael Meissner wrote:
: Ummm, the AS/400 was based out of Rochester, Minnesota at least initially.
[snip]
: Now that AS/400's are based on special PowerPC's, the home may have moved
: to Austin, which is the PowerPC/AIX center.

The AS/400 (now named iSeries) is and always has been produced in
Rochester Minnesota.  The RS/6000 (now named pSeries) is designed
in Austin.  Both the AS/400 and the RS/6000 are manufactured in
Rochester.  As of some model which escapes me now, both AS/400 and
RS/6000 computers use the *same* PowerPC processor.  The only
difference is that the AS/400 runs the processor in "tags active"
mode (ie, the 65th tag bit enabled).  The first PowerPC processors
used in the AS/400 was designed here in Rochester.  Follow-ons were
designed in Austin.


Kai Henningsen wrote:
: ISTR there's a gcc port for the AS/400.

Due to the fact that the AS/400 has 1 address space shared by all
processes, several restrictions have been implemented.  The main
restriction regarding your statement above is that *all* code that runs
on the AS/400 is compiled by the "trusted" translator (an exception
would be our Java JIT).  This means you cannot create a binary with gcc
and hope to run it on the AS/400.  However, you may use gcc to produce
MI instructions which can then be passed to the trusted translator.



Peter

--
Peter Bergner
SLIC Optimizing Translator Development / Linux PPC64 Kernel Development
IBM Rochester, MN
bergner@us.ibm.com

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Thomas Dodd]

Kai Henningsen wrote:
> No. GEM, I believe, originally came from CP/M. Most popular as the
> windowing system of the Atari ST; given that someone did a quick-hack MS-
> DOS clone to support it on the 68K, it seems fairly obvious that by that
> time, it had already been ported to MS-DOS. (GEM-DOS is the only os I know
> of that was actually worse than MS-DOS.)

And ATARI goofed by not including more than GEM in the ST(e).
Should have used the whole system like the TT and Falcon did.

> Friends of mine (Gereon Steffens and Stefan Eissing) wrote a command-line

If you see them, tell them an old STe user thanks them for there
work. Without them I might never have headed to Unix :)

Vielen Dank Herren.

> shell and desktop replacement for the Atari that was fairly successful
> shareware for a while ... now how was it called? The CLI was Mupfel
> (German for shell is Muschel, and there was a kid's TV character who
> pronounced Muschel as Mupfel), and I think the desktop was Gemini. Another

I still have Gemini on a Disk for my STe. The SCSI adaptor died,
so I don't know if the data is still good though.

Then I tried the Minix port MinT (Mint is not TOS :)
and was hooked on Unix. If I could get my SCSI adaptor
fixed/replaced I'd still have my STe running, maybe
even get a memory card (for > 4Meg) and a CPU upgrade
(68000 is slow, get 68030 or 40 like the Falcon)

Then I could run Linux on it (it need that math co-proc)

	-Thomas

RE: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Mike Jagdis]

> I hope the following adds a more direct perspective on this, as I
> was a user at the time.

I was _almost_ at university :-). However I do have a first edition
of the IBM Xenix Software Development Guide from december 1984. It has
'84 IBM copyright and '83 MS copyright. The SCO stuff I have goes back
to '83 - MS copyrights on it go back to '81 but that's probably just
the compiler and DOS compatibility.

  Basically Xenix was the first MS/IBM attempt at a "real OS" for the
PC. MS realised that multiuser/multitasking was less important than
colour graphics for PC owners and decided to pull out of the Xenix business.
IBM licensed it under their name to keep their desktop computer concept
alive while the Xenix team emerged from the shake out to form SCO.

				Mike

--
Chief Network Architect		Mobile:	+44 7780 608 368
Kokua Communications Ltd	Office:	+44 20 7292 1680
52-53 Conduit Street		Fax:		+44 20 7292 1681
London W1S 2YX

Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

[Rob Landley]

On Saturday 23 June 2001 13:57, Mike Jagdis wrote:
> > I hope the following adds a more direct perspective on this, as I
> > was a user at the time.
>
> I was _almost_ at university :-). However I do have a first edition
> of the IBM Xenix Software Development Guide from december 1984. It has
> '84 IBM copyright and '83 MS copyright. The SCO stuff I have goes back
> to '83 - MS copyrights on it go back to '81 but that's probably just
> the compiler and DOS compatibility.

Ooh!  Ooh!  I don't suppose I could borrow that?  (Hmm...  Driving to london 
isn't quite something my car's up to.  For one thing, there's no gas stations 
in the middle of the atlantic.)

The copyright dates back to when they shipped it.  I believe Microsoft's 
license with AT&T was signed in 1979 and actual work started in 1980, but 
that's in a different notebook...

>   Basically Xenix was the first MS/IBM attempt at a "real OS" for the
> PC. MS realised that multiuser/multitasking was less important than
> colour graphics for PC owners and decided to pull out of the Xenix
> business. IBM licensed it under their name to keep their desktop computer
> concept alive while the Xenix team emerged from the shake out to form SCO.

Don't make the mistake of treating IBM -OR- Microsoft as a monolithic entity. 
 IBM had a dozen departments constantly at war with each other: Unix had its 
pockets of supporters at IBM, some of whom did AIX.

At Microsoft, Paul Allen was the bix Unix fan.  Gates was indifferent to it, 
and was far more interested in the Xerox Parc perspective.

Both Bell Labs and Xerox Parc totally revolutionized computing.  Bell Labs 
worked from the inside out, how the machine works and what programmers can 
get it to do.  Multitasking, hierarchical filesystem, block and character 
device drivers, streams, pipes, etc.  Xerox Parc worked from the outside in, 
how the user interacts with the computer and what they experience.  Wysiwyg 
printing, Windows and Icons and Mice in a GUI.  (Xerox also did object 
oriented programming, and networking which was related to both the user and 
system level.  Then again Unix spun out of porting a flight simulator to the 
PDP 7.  It's not QUITE that black and white...)

In any case, gates was on the Xerox side and Allen was on the BTL side.  When 
Allen left microsoft, Xenix followed soon after.  (First SCO was "helping", 
then over the next few years the whole thing was gradually dumped on them and 
the umbilical severed.)

Remember, Xenix hadn't made much of a splash in the PC world before 1984 
because the PC simply didn't have the power to run it.  YOU try doing 
anything useful with Unix in -LESS- than 512k of ram.  That doesn't mean it 
wasn't having a big impact behind the scenes at Microsoft.  (Similarly, 
windowing interfaces were Jobs's passion for 4 or 5 years before the 
macintosh launch, whether or not Apple's revenues or customers even knew 
about it.)

Rob