[rescue] Interactive Unix?

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Monday, December 10, 2001 at 14:21:15 (-0500), Andrew Weiss wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] Interactive Unix?
>
> Microsoft did UNIX for a long time... it was called Xenix.  I have an old
> MS brochure selling Xenix and certain MS DOS apps for Xenix plus that
> special mouse card they had with Xenix compatibility built in.

Yes, M$ did oritinally "create" Xenix, and wrote/ported apps for Xenix.
It was a licensed version of Unix V7 from Bell Labs though.  M$ was no
different than any other third-party OEM of Unix, except perhaps in the
fact that they didn't sell the hardware it was designed to write on.

>  I even
> used Xenix 3.1a on an old 8086 Altos with 4 9600 baud serial terminals in
> a UNIX in chemistry course I took at the University of MD... it was an
> awesome course led by this rather kooky old professor... ls took 30-40
> seconds ... damn those things were slow... But it made me want to rescue
> my first old machine just to run that.  Then of course I believe SCO
> bought Xenix and turned it into Interactive UNIX and then UNIXware...
> which was then bought by Caldera... and SCO also had OpenServer products
> as well.

     "Microsoft announces Microsoft Xenix OS, a portable operating
     system for 16-bit microprocessors. It is an interactive, multiuser,
     multitasking system that will run on Intel 8086, Zilog Z8000,
     Motorola M68000, and DEC PDP-11 series. All of Microsoft's existing
     system software (Cobol, Pascal, Basic, and DBMS) will be adapted to
     run under the Xenix system, and all existing software written for
     Unix OS will be compatible as well. "
                                                                                
     --from a Microsoft press release, August 25, 1980

Note that August 1980 was indeed almost exactly a full year before
MS-DOS-1.0 was introduced.  Before that M$ was mostly built on Bill's
BASIC, at over $1 million in sales by the 1978!

>From Micro$oft's own "Key Events in Microsoft History" document:

   8/25/80   Microsoft announces Microsoft XENIX OS, a portable operating
             system for 16-bit microprocessors. All of Microsoft's
             existing system software (COBOL, PASCAL, BASIC and DBMS)
             will be adapted to run under the XENIX system, and all
             existing software written for UNIX OS will be compatible as
             well.

   8/12/81   IBM introduces its Personal Computer, which uses Microsoft's
             16-bit operating system, Microsoft MS-DOS version 1.0,
             plus Microsoft Basic, Microsoft COBOL, Microsoft Pascal,
             and other Microsoft products.

A friend of mine wrote about The Death Of Xenix a few years ago for
Linux Journal:  http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=2062

The first Xenix I remember was Xenix-11, in about 1981.  It was, of
course, for the digital PDP/11.  It was basically V7 with some BSD and
PWB user-land tools, and a somewhat bastardised and trimmed down kernel.
It was one of the first commercially viable supported Unixes for the
PDP/11, digital's own port of pure V7 being more of an academic toy, and
of course Bell Labs original release being unsupported.

As for why M$ developers in Redmond had Xenix on their desktop even up
to the days when MS-Windows 3.0 was being released, well this entry from
M$'s history might give part of the answer:

   7/16/82  The Microsoft Local Area Network (MILAN) is now fully
   functional, linking all of Microsoft's in-house development computers
   including a DEC 2060, two PDP-11/70s, a VAX 11/250 and many MC68000
   machines running XENIX. This system will simplify e-mail delivery
   on-site.

That VAX grew into a big 8600 or some such and the developer support
forums ran on it up until at least 1987 or even later.  (Don't ask me
how I know that -- I don't want to remember the details! ;-)

As for SCO's history, well see:

	http://stage.caldera.com/about/history.html

They don't say exactly how they acquired Xenix, but IIRC it was
initially as a contract so that M$ could farm out their Xenix
development to an outside firm.  I suspect M$'s investment in SCO
happened about the time SCO took on the licensing for Xenix.  I don't
know when the actual Xenix master license was transferred to SCO, if
indeed it ever was.

Interactive UNIX though certainly never came from SCO -- it came from
Interactive Systems Corporation, and was just a branded version of AT&T
UNIX System V/386.  ISC was a competitor to SCO, though the principles
knew each other well and often socialised together IIRC.  An earlier
version was called "386/ix".  SysV/386 was AT&T and SCO's merge of Xenix
technology into UNIX SysVr3.2.  I don't think M$ had much to do with it
directly, other than licensing whatever copyright nonsense was
necessary.  SCO wanted to merge Xenix tools and compatability into Intel
SysV so that they could ditch Xenix and base their new products on
licensed source from AT&T.

I had the pleasure of talking to Doug Michaels several times and working
with him on the board of UniForum back when I was a board member of
UniForum Canada.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
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