Microsoft and Xenix.

Alan Chandler
2001-06-22T22:41:30Z

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>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