On 3/24/2020 12:53 PM, dmccunney wrote:
On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 1:48 PM Felix Miata <mrma...@earthlink.net> wrote:
I ran a 286 Altos Xenix multiuser in 1988 just fine, Unix-y enough I
couldn't tell
any difference from SysV.
With what sort of hardware?
Xenix, if memory serves, began based on Unix System III and was
gradually enhanced to make it SysV compatible. Depending upon what you
were doing, you might not have run into the differences between System
III and System V.
And Xenix, if memory serves again, was originally a Microsoft product,
back when they were peripherally in the Unix business.
I was working in '83-'85 at a company where we also ran Altos 286
machines with Xenix. As well as running Unix SysV on Sage and Cromemco
machines with both Motorola 68000 and 68010. The later had NOT a have
buildin MMU, but allowed for cooperation with the OPTIONAL 68451MMU
controller chip. The 80286 however had a basic MMU onchip.
And Microsoft was not just "peripherally" involved in the Unix business,
well, at least as much as they were at that time in the OS business with
MS-DOS. Xenix btw was licensed directly from AT&T.
At the time "second sourcing" was the rule, so they licensed the Santa Cruz
Operation to also sell Xenix. When MS decided to get out of the Unix
market and concentrate on Windows, SCO became the Xenix vendor, and
enhanced Xenix to SysV compatibility and offered it as SCO Unix.
SCO was not a second source, they bought the Xenix business from
Microsoft, when those guys rather quickly realized that all the
supposedly cheaper micro processor based systems were tried to be sold
at a price point close to the existing mini computers at the time, and
hence didn't sell anywhere near the numbers they had hoped for.
It was not OS that brought the bacon home for Microsoft in those years,
it was their variety of programming languages/compilers as well as the
fledgling user applications like Word and Multiplan...
OS/2, a collaboration between IBM and MS, was supposed to be the New!,
Improved! OS. It foundered due to disagreements between IBM and MS.
MS *wanted* to skip the 286 and develop for the 386. That was a
sensible notion, and had IBM agreed we might all be running it now.
But IBM had promised support for the 286, so...
ts/listinfo/freedos
OS/2 came about, as far as Microsoft was concerned, because their
attempt to get into the slowly growing Unix market didn't go as planned.
It allowed them to bring their core business into a new market (OS) that
could take advantage of the rapidly increasing capabilities of the newer
microprocessors, something that wasn't really possible with DOS. And
they saw the OS business now more of a bread winner, as they quickly
lost ground in the programming language business (mainly the competition
from newcomer Borland, as well as others) leaving only the application
market, once they got a usable GUI system for desktops on the market
with Windows 3.x.
Ralf
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