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Microsoft's Ancient History w/ Unix
NutscrapeSucks writes "The Register is running
a article which discusses Microsoft's experience running their own version of UNIX, called Xenix, as their standard desktop operating system. Before they got involved with OS/2 and later NT, Microsoft considered UNIX to be the PC operating system of the future. Talks about Bill Gates running vi, difficulties with AT&T, and other interesting tidbits."
There's a lot of stuff everyone knows, and a lot of stuff you probably didn't
know. Worth a read.
Kerberos..
Shortcuts.. Symbolic links.
Multitasking..
How many others?
Not to troll, but a lot of Microsoft's innovations are actually recycled ideas that've been around for years. No, really, not to troll - I'm glad they've taken certain ideas from Unix. It wouldn't make sense for them to have not done so. There's a lot of good stuff in the various Unices out there.
Bill Gates running vi
I don't know why this in particular would stick out as something surprising. People on this site seem to forget that Gates is a serious geek - he's not some MBA who got lucky. I wouldn't be surprised if he _still_ uses vi, maybe even under Cygwin, on his own machines.
--saint
NT is a weak form of unix like a donught is a weak form of a particle accelerator.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
"And through Windows NT, you can see it throughout the design. In a weak sense, it is a form of Unix."
Actually, Windows NT was built very much like VMS, the operating system for the VAX built by DEC. David Cutler, one of the main architects for VMS, was hired by Microsoft to build Windows NT. The name Windows NT itself is one of those HAL like play on letters where each letter is the VMS letter plus 1. WNT VMS
Believe in things of which no person has ever learned
Doesn't windows run on top of UNIX? ;p
...and Microsoft has Xenix.
Coincidence? I think not.
I heard that to settle a legal dispute MS agreed to NEVER produce a version of UNIX.
I dont have any more detail than that, can anyone back me up with details ?
When I worked at Microsoft in the early 90s, the role of Xenix was pretty much relegated to a glorified email terminal. A few old-timer people on the teams I worked with used it, and few of those people did anything but read their email remotely on the Xenix email servers. I don't recall anyone actually running Xenix on any box within their own office.
At no time did I get the impression that a developer at Microsoft felt that Xenix/UNIX was the future of the desktop. It was big, it was bloated, it couldn't run on then-current PCs well, nevermind the smaller machines of the mid-80s.
Sure, maybe there were some hold-outs in groups I didn't interact with, and I was only there long past Xenix heyday, but Xenix had no chance at the desktop, really.
[
I can see that being revealed in the future. By day CEO of Microsoft, by night coding for 10 different free sofware projects under psuedonyms, like B1ll G4t3s.
If I remember correctly my Dad's GP surgery (England) used to use Xenix
heh, what's the world coming to when we have to correct 31337 speak?
Since when does running "vi" make you a geek? Vi is just yet another antiquated shitty text editor that should die off.
(-5, Troll)
--saint
The phrase "Your technological distinctiveness will be added to our own" springs to mind.
Video Game cheats, hints a
Yeah vi is for losers. Any true geek uses ed.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
How do you cut n paste in vi ?
beyond the basics of vi ( insert, escape,I've asked several people, and none of them know how to cut n paste in vi. Most of them recommended opening up a Samba share in the /etc/smb.conf or using FTP to transfer files to Windows to cut n paste in the file, and then transfer the files back. This doesn't indicate a good editor. Perhaps if the vi guys actually provided readable documentation, it'd gain market share. For now, it doesn't have my vote.
Or if Microsoft had stuck with Xenix rather than throwing it back into the pot... But enough of that.
That was actually the most interesting speculation. What if MS kept Xenix and was successful with it? Considering its history co-opting & corrupting good technology, and its propensity toward monopolization through its proprietary property, perhaps Xenix would be the only widely implemented form of *nix around today. And if we still had a Linux, it might be a whole different OS.
Ha-ha. Microsoft had a product named "UNIX." That's such a stupid name, obviously no one there ever said it out loud.
:)
M$ sucks!
</sarcasm>
qslack.com
There are so many post I'd like to respond to that instead I'll post my replys in this one big message.
First of all, to the moderator who moderated to 0 the comment about NT meaning "New Technology", go read a little and you'll find out that it's true.
Second of all, Microsoft didn't rip off Unix. No sir they didn't. They just applied concepts that everyone has been incorporating for years in their OSes. It's like saying that the Saturn cars are ripping the 1900's Fords because Ford has been here for almost a century (I think, maybe it's some other company).
Third, if you've programmed a lot in Windows, you'll notice that the API is very different then it's Unix conterpart, and by that I don,t mean only different names for same methods. Ever noticed that everything in Windows is centralized around handles, objects and the WaitForSingleObject/WaitForMultipleObject that are used everywhere in the OS to wait for something to complete/release/signal/join? That's pretty elegant, and it enables a user to lock a lot of different resources (mutexes, event, thread, semaphores, sockets) all in once, helping to avoid some pretty nasty deadlocks sometimes. Unix and Linux doesn't have these. Go through the API, you'll say that it's very rich and not that much borrowed from Unix.
There are a lot of other Microsoft myths out there, and I guess that's because a lot of people just think they know stuff because they know how to recompile their kernel, when in fact they know "shit" about OS infrastructure and concepts.
If people start using more than two acronyms per a sentence I start getting a H.E.A.D.A.C.H.E. trying to work out what it is they mean.
Video Game cheats, hints a
ATT had no reason to "properly manage" UNIX. ATT's forays into areas that the FCC deemed outside of the realm of telecommunications (i.e. computer HW & SW) resulted in a a choice for ATT:
1. retain the telecommunications monopoly but refrain from any money-making ventures outside of the telecom area
2. become a real business, make money on anything you want, and open up competition in telecommunications.
ATT chose choice #1 -- retain the monopoly. This was for them a sure thing. They had always managed to retain the monopoly in the past and it provided a steady source of income. Computers were new, and internally were not percieved as a consumer item.
So at the time Bill was talking about ATT, the UNIX development/administration/lisencing was, by legal necesity, not a money-making area for ATT. UNIX was a tool to develop telecom products, the real business of ATT. Giving the technology away and managing the process "for the public good" was a means to demonstrate that it was not a money-making venture as well as a way to trumpet Bell Labs. It didn't recieve the best support from management, though, as they were focused on the money-making areas of the business.
On the other hand, the statement that ATT didn't know what they had, was that ever true! Once they did figure it out it was too late, they were legally barred from that market untl after deregulation (nothing is forever!) -- too late!
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
And that way MS-DOS isn't Microsoft Disk Operating System but Microsoft's Dirty Operating System.
First they took out the Quick Bits and kept the dirty bits....
roger
Bill Gates was the keynote speaker at the Trenton Computer Festival in the early 90's. He spoke about His Vision, which included a processor per person, or even more. He said "There are more people running DOS than anything else". Later, when he took questions, I asked him about Unix: "But each Unix machine serves multiple people at the same time". He countered that with "Unix isn't the future."
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I also worked on Siemens SINIX and most of the kernel includes were (C) Microsoft Corporation :)
Unix? The future?? *nix is a sloppy pile a' dogcrap SPLAT run over by a truck-tire. SPLAT ... that's also the sound of 6-finger webtoed weenies reaching under a truck-tire ... hehe
So what your saying is that to get started out on the Road Ahead, Mr. Gates needed a jumpstart from a unix beater or a vax cadillac, and his driving manual was written in vi?
I don't see how Microsoft incorporating UNIX pirinciples into NT demonstrates any hypocrisy on their part. When they said they wanted a different business model and direction than UNIX, yet expounded UNIX for its technical elegance and power, how can this be rectified?
Well, they incorporated UNIX principles as desired into a new system that they felt could gain wider desktop acceptance.
If the author is indignant that MS rejected the precious UN*X philosophy (whose design goals could arguably be mutually exclusive with widespread desktop acceptance), he should just say it. If he really doesn't understand, his reasoning faculties should be brought into question.
"The Xenix name was later used for a version which could run on machines with little or no memory management - eg a 286. (Like Minix and Idris) This was a lame idea from the start, and did not survive the introduction of the 386 commercially."
Would that happen to be the version that ran on a TRS80 model 16 Business computer?
As one who uses both VMS and NT on a daily basis, I can attest that the similarities between the two platforms are nonexistent as far as stability and robustness are concerned. VMS is one of the most stable OS's ever to gain widespread deployment. NT is somewhat lacking in this respect, to say the least.
yoyodyne:~$ uname -a /usr/bin/clear
So remember, kiddies, don't make unauthorized copies ofSunOS yoyodyne 5.8 Generic_108528-13 sun4u sparc SUNW,UltraSPARC-IIi-cEngine
yoyodyne:~$ grep Microsoft
# Copyright (c) 1987, 1988 Microsoft Corporation
# This Module contains Proprietary Information of Microsoft
Seems to me that the message is more like "*inx flavors aren't the future due to it's lack of leadership."
The sort of thing that is an indirect attack on GNU/GPL commons, which is both a flavor of Unix and by nature
having an absence of overall leadership.
And thgis isn't the first time I've seen such faulty insinuations being made towards GNU/GPL.
what are you? dork.
It runs on the mach kernal, BSD & all that.
"If it is indeed true that Microsoft was running on Xenix up until Windows 3.1, it casts an interesting light on how flexible Bill's vision of the future was right up until the early 90s."
If I recall correctly, the last Xenix server on the MS corporate backbone was removed in late 96- early 1997. Primarily, they were used as Internet gateways, running Sendmail. Also , they functioned as internal gateways between MSMail and Exchange while the company converted everyone over to having personal mailboxes on an Exchange server.
While we tried to get some improvements made to applications running on the Xenix boxes, rumour had it that no one could develop these apps, since the source code had been lost somewhere on campus. Also, this is why they couldn't sell the OS to another company.....c'est la vie
Look all ye unbelievers. The article states:
"Mac Word and Mac Excel, Windows Excel and Windows Word were written in vi"
and also says that Bill Gates himself used Vi.
This just goes to prove what us Emacs users have known for a long time - Vi is the tool of Satan. Well, a tool of Satan. I expect that the tool of Satan is long, pointed and greasy with sharp hairs and spurts sulphuric acid. Sorry, got a bit carried away there. Vi users - repent of your evil ways. The only path to true salvation is though Emacs.
HH
Slideshow: http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix-win2000/invite dtalks/lucovsky_html/.
In there, you'll learn 'NT' was related to the first proc it was targeted to, the 860 of intel, codenamed 'N10', plus some juicy stuff about the development of NT3.1 and win2k, and some related notes to Unix and NT.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
I was hunting around on my Solaris machine at the office yesterday. For amusement, I looked at the shell script it's got for /usr/bin/clear. In addition to containing the standard AT&T copyright, it also contains a Microsoft Copyright:
/* SVr4.0 1.3 */
/usr/bin/tput ${1:+-T$1} clear 2> /dev/null, but you didn't hear that from me.
#!/usr/bin/sh
# Copyright (c) 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 AT&T
# All Rights Reserved
# THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T
# The copyright notice above does not evidence any
# actual or intended publication of such source code.
#ident "@(#)clear.sh 1.8 96/10/14 SMI"
# Copyright (c) 1987, 1988 Microsoft Corporation
# All Rights Reserved
# This Module contains Proprietary Information of Microsoft
# Corporation and should be treated as Confidential.
# clear the screen with terminfo.
#
It thought it rather amusing to see a Microsoft copyright there of all places. And the source is only two lines of code, one of them being exit. It's left as an exercise to the reader which line (first or second) is exit.
The other line is
"It's important to realize that MS-DOS is part of a family of operating systems....Providing the user with a family of operating system capabilities means a clear migration path from MS-DOS to XENIX. That means compatibility for both the terminal end user and the systems programmer.
A standard library for XENIX-86 C will allow compilation of a program on XENIX system and then execution on MS-DOS....XENIX systems will be able to function as network file servers."
So as you can see, Microsoft had big plans for XENIX back then. As it turned out, XENIX's place in the Microsoft family was first taken by OS/2, and then by NT.
- adam
I deployed a number of Xenix installations in the mid- to late 1980's, the last one in either 1989 or 1990. We were competing against Novell Netware networks (back when TeleVideo made that hideous Novell dedicated hardware with the 286 and the Z-80 and all the way to the IBM PS/2 model 80 days) and usually beat them hands down for an inventory and POS application. Our customers were medium-size enterprises (up to 200 employees, up to five physical locations). The configuration:
The advantages of using this:
NCR *nix, Xenix, Minix, and AIX 3.0 were the first *nix OSs I was involved with, back in 1985 and forward. I went from Apple's Applesoft/ProDOS/MacOS/UCSD Pascal to *nix, then to Microsoft's world.
All in all, I remember Xenix being one of the most complete *nix environments I played with. Only AIX running on RS/6000 (I was working on them prior to the announcement in March 1990) was more complete in its blend of SV and BSD tools. SCO occasionally facilitated SCO Unix to us but it was a PIA to install and configure, and lacked *lots* of driver support.
The interesting thing to us was that, while Xenix was an MS product, MS had a very hands off approach towards it. All customer relationships were handled by SCO. The only time I ever remember Bill G. saying something about it was when he was asked about branching NT away from OS/2 and whether he was afraid of losing market share to *nix. His reply (I'm paraphrasing): We have DOS, Windows, OS/2, Xenix, and NT. It's Microsoft against Microsoft against Microsoft against Microsoft.
OK, time to stop reminiscing. Have a great Saturday.
Ehttp://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
Take the GUI off, take the crappy drivers that are binding to the kernel off - and see if NT is stable or not..
Hint - it will be the most stable thing you've seen on PC (at that time)..
Hetz (Heunique)
Our company (Logica) licenced Xenix from Microsoft for distribution on the UK in the early '80s (and later sold out to SCO). I purchased a copy from our internal product department in about '83 in order to create a configuration management system (using SCCS) for my team for our own (SCADA) software which ran under RSX-11M. Except that my copy of Xenix ran on a PDP-11/34 not on an IBM PC.
This was perhaps one of the first client server implementations of Configuration Management, very similar to what CVS is today. The server was this Xenix based 11/34 and the clients were PDP 11's running RSX-11M and the networking was homegrown protocols over serial links.
After I had been running this software for at least 18 months I remember being given a demonstration of a new version that our internal Xenix group had just received running on an early IBM PC (don't know the model, probably an AT - it was pre PS/2). This was because we were trying to decide on a platform for the client end a new version of our SCADA software that was to become client server and we were comparing XENIX (multitasking but no GUI interface - but at the time we were only replacing a system which used block graphic character based colour terminals), GEM (anyone remember that!) and Windows 2.0. We chose Windows for reasons I can't remember - but were able to dominate UK Water Company SCADA systems for most of the '80s
I was just after this that I was able to justify the purchase of a MiniVAX and a version of Unix System V for our Configuration Management server on the savings in maintenance costs over the PDP-11 and Xenix was ditched.
Xenix ... is now trapped somewhere and will return some day.
Some day is now. Xenix became SCO UnixWare became Open UNIX 8.
Funny quote on that page from Unisys: "Through it, our customers can jointly run Open UNIX 8 and Windows applications, giving them the flexibility of multiple platforms handling diverse responsibilities." Guess they left out the part about "such as using tools that support GIF for all your bitmap image processing needs."
Will I retire or break 10K?
Then how come Northern Telecom holds some copyrights for Windows NT?
I ran Xenix for years, on the 386, 486, and Pentium. It wasn't bloated, it was rock-solid reliable. Xenix not only survived the introduction of the 386, it thrived. Many vertical applications (doctors' offices, etc) are still running these systems. By my lights, it was a very good Unix (though not fully SVID-compliant). I learned a lot and made a lot of money with Xenix.
SCO's move from Xenix to Unix coincided with their less developer-friendly, more grab-the-cash mentality (adding RAM to your box? That's an additional license fee, please.) as Doug Micheals took over from his dad (Larry), and played a large role in SCO's decline and eventual purchase by Caldera.
I'll always have fond memories of my years with Xenix, though. Even though my video card has more RAM than any of my Xenix boxes ever had -- hell my Palm IIIxe as as much.
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
You might find this funny:
Xenix XP
MD
The article left out the part where Gates & CO. realized that all the mac users were actually HAPPY when they were using thier computers. Which is why 10 YEARS after MacOS was on the market, they produced their own cheap knock-off and somehow managed to make everyone think it was new.
Bill probably does still use vi, there's a binary for vi in the NT resource kit in the posix folder along with the source code to a couple of other commands.
I had a dream where I was taunting Bill Gates about how much I loved my Mac and I was saying "HA HA I have a mac I have a mac" and Bill Gates looked me straight in the eye and said, "But Microsoft makes TONS of software for the Mac" They even gave Apple a bunch of money! And what do you know... OSX is like all Unixy and stuff...
...Well at least in my mind it was. Xenix was my first introduction to that "YOU NUCKS" thing I kept hearing about. I was a pimply faced teenager who was friends with a real live "hacker". Imagine that. But anyway, he did some wardialing and found a open Xenix box, and gave me the info. I remember calling him up going 'dude, whats the command to do DIR ? '. Little did I know at the time, but because of that one experience, i would fall in love with unix for the rest of my life... I sit here typing on my linux box, remembering thinking how it would be cool to run a unix clone on my pc in circa 1994 and have something similiar to that first box i encountered. aww..the memories..
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
Bull5h17. Another example of the U.S. Government (not the democracy) as a form of Church.
... and we'd be praising the virtues of an open source NT.
Two interesting points which jumped out at me when I was reading Billy G's Unix Expo Remarks remembering that they were from October 9, 1996 were:
One of the exciting things we're announcing today is that our commitment to the Internet and to building a state-of-the-art browser extends not only to Windows 95 and Windows NT, but also to 16-bit Windows and the Macintosh and to Unix.
Explorer for Unix!
And this:
And the reason we do that -- it's not purely a magnanimous thing on our part. (Laughter.) We're doing that to promote the Active X technology, and by having the browser be out there very, very broadly...
Clearly an early vision of .Net!
He's thinking microkernel, not Mach. NT originally was going to be a microkernel, like Mach is. But they canned that idea for a more monolithic architecture for performance reasons.
BTW: Mac OS X is closer to NeXT than anything else. It's Mach, with a BSD layer, with some BSD userland stuff, and some NeXTSTEP userland things...
In 1979 all that existed of Xenix was a silver brochure from Microsoft
/usr/games
but there was no distribution. I wanted it to run it/sell it, seeing that
you could do the timesharing thing just like back at college, except
without a giant machine behind glass. I contacted the then tiny
Microsoft, asked, begged, pleaded but they had nothing to sell.
After multiple inquiries, they finally told me that they didn't have
Xenix yet, but they expected it to arrive shortly. Arrive? From where?
I was told, from Human Computing Resources (HCR) in Toronto.
Ahh, interesting. So I called HCR somehow got them to commit
to an early delivery. After a few weeks, and several dollars, the
day came. MS wanted a PDP-11 and 68000 version and was
only after the PDP-11 distro, I was 1 week ahead in the queue
from Microsoft. So, as I was told from HCR, I had the first Xenix
distribution in the US, ahead of Microsoft. I ran it on a LSI-11/23
with insanely expensive 256Kb of memory and a giant 20Mb
drive from Charles River Data Systems. It also had 2 eight inch
floppies (errrtt, clunk, clunk, errrrttt), and 2 four port serial cards
that each ran a VT100. The distro came on a 9-track tape (which
I still have) and the take drive was this weird, front loading thing
where you loaded the tape in the front like a big floppy and it
auto threaded the tape (sometimes). As I remember, it seemed
pretty fast, I'd start up stuff on all of the terminals, just to do it.
Of course, it wasn't that fast but at the time....
The Unix itself was a more or less pure Unix v7. The only thing,
as I remember that made is Xenix, was the boot message and
the captions on the man pages. There was no vi at that time,
the editor of choice was "ed". It did have a nice
and I got a Zork for it from a friend.
We ended up selling a few of the boxes. The company was
called MSD. The only record of such is in a 1981 (Jan?) issue
of Byte with our little ad in the back. And that's the story of the
first commercial Unix sold in the US.
When I came to Microsoft in 1980 I was pitching my real-time kernel that had almost the same API as UNIX but some real-time mojo and a somewhat different FS. My NOTNIX ran on the 68000, so porting UNIX, marketing called it XENIX, to the 68k was easy for me.
Second say part ofthe story: later I was doing a demo of my client-server windows system (1983) and MS decided it liked an all-in-one-address-space approach better. Some of you were todlers back theni, I guess.
It's not that Unix fell off, it's just that it didn't grow into new markets: PC's, low end workstations, embedded systems, etc. AT&T and all the other big Unix vendors had no interest in "toys", (Hubis, it'll get you every time). They sat around and *watched* Microsoft eat up entire markets.
Mac OS X. The "10" stands for "about 10 years to late".
I'd bet my left nut that "stuff-to-read" has to be the most common department by a longshot.
You are =so= close to the truth.
Consider Ted Nelson's revolutionary book _Computer Lib / Dream Machines_. This book changed my life. I ceased being a drug-crazed radical hippy and became a drug-crazed radical computer geek.
The first edition contained great tirades over IBM.
Then Microsoft Press bought the book, castrated it, and released the second edition. All of the heart and soul was gone from it. All of the anti-monopolistic material was removed.
The original edition is nearly impossible to find now. I haven't seen a single one since the second edition came out, about 1985.
I would treasure even a photocopy of the original.
Where can I get it from? I have an old 8086 lying around to play with it on :-)
"dd p" would be enough. dd copies the deleted line into the buffer so, you don't need to yy before doing dd. ;-) Ctrl-X Ctrl-C...I think :-)
Anyway, I'm a novice vi user. Strange thing: at College the only thing they teached us was "Esc:q" to quit from vi...in case we accidentally typed vi. Emacs was our editor, strangely enough I woudn't even be able to use emacs anymore: all I remember is how to quit it
Not a troll, but Linux is really nothing new.
In fact, FreeBSD does everything it does, better
and years ago and is more stable.
Sometimes moderators just suck! Yes, I am very well aware that this will give me a Karma hit. Go fire!
That is pretty much how MS got big. They keep enough different things alive that whatever new fad or trend comes along, they have something similar already in a corner.
Windows was a poor seller in the mid and late 80's, but MS still kept it alive "just in case". Most other software companies dump loosing products after a few years, because they are not big enuf to carry them all.
I bet they are playing with Word for Linux in a dark corner somewhere, just in case.
Table-ized A.I.
http://www.microsoft.com/unix/ie/default.asp
Same vintage, different binaries, of course. The model 16 was a 68000 machine.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
Ok, so has anyone got a download link to 'Xenix'. Im sure it'd be a good laugh getting it running on an old pc. (Laugh being to laugh at not laugh for enjoyment of)
This guy is absolutely correct-- just about any problems you can find with older versions of NT stems from drivers/resources/applications written by *SOMEONE ELSE*.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
A/UX or Apple UNIX was Apple computer's entry into the desktop UNIX world. It ran on their 68030 and '040 based systems, but was never ported to the PowerPC when they made the move to that CPU architechture in the early 90's.
A/UX had a nice GUI (it was from Apple after all!) which was very similar to the Macintosh GUI of the time (System 7). It had all the greatness of UNIX, including pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory, and it was even able to run most Macintosh applications without modification. Yes, you could bring up a terminal window and much around with a command line if you so pleased, but like today's Mac OS X, you never needed to. Sadly Apple only marketted it to corporate and higher-education users, so it never caught on and was forgotten.
My unclde use to work for Lee Data Inc before they were sold off to some Isaraeli company. We had a few of their machines for awhile. They were 286's that ran MS Xenix. The machines had support for 8 terminals and an card for another 8. The motherboard was huge though, at around 24" x 18". They ran on MFMs and were mainly used with Informix.
I also have a copy of MS Word for SCO/Xenix. Its on two floppies.
Never used Altair basic, so I won't diss it, but since the versions that MS has produced since then (GW Basic, Qbasic, VBasic) are pretty incredibly shoddy compared to implementations that predated DOS I am guessing the criticism is probably fair.
Everytime someone claims Bill Gates is a "geek" let alone implying he's some sort of superlative geek, I must say I take that as a personal attack on all true geeks. In a sense it's true. I mean, well, look at him - obviously that was his social assignment in high school, yes. But he's about the worst example of a geek ever. He's simply never shown competence at anything except management and marketing.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I quivered at the thought of this possible alternative universe when I went to the website. If BIll never agreed to do os/2 then all of that might of happened. We might of all been using MS Xenix right now. Funny as hell. Mod the parent up.
http://saveie6.com/
NT stands for Northern Telecom (Nortel) who originally developed it. However, after MS acquired it, they also referred to it as "New Technology." It's not in any sense a unix implementation, although it is in some senses a VMS implementation. Digital Equipment sued over that and got paid off several years ago.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
This is one of the poorest articles I have ever read. The author jumps all over the place and makes vague quotes coming from nowhere..kinda like this comment
Actually it was the workstations that did it. Digital's were relatively slow and expensive and could be delivered - eventually. Sun's were relatively cheap and you didn't have to stretch a salesman over a rack to get an allocation.
Hey, back in the day at MS I used Xenix to get to Usenet and other internet resources. I was one of the last to give it up, when they pried it out of my fingers. [wasnt willing to die for that one]
including the Web, Byte and others, I’ve written down in Portuguese. I’ve already got a very bad translation into English, am looking for confirmation about the exact relationship between Mach and NT before I do a proper revision of the English version.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
>I heard that to settle a legal dispute MS agreed to NEVER produce a version of UNIX.
:)
So if UNIX really is the future then MS is doomed to die? Vhuppii... only good news this weekend.
FRA: STFU GTFO
IBM/HAL, Santa/Saten, its all part of a biiig plot...
Come -on-!!! Its an anagram, for goodness sake. How hard is it to reuse the same letters!?
I might get modded down for caring... apparently many geeks still don't realize that style really is substance. But the correct spelling is "SATAN" not "saten".
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
intresting!
>I heard that to settle a legal dispute MS agreed to NEVER produce a version of UNIX.
This is true. M$ sold Xenix to SCO SCO Unix is Xenix or was Xenix. But part of the condition of the sale was the M$ could NEVER produce a version of Unix again. That is why NT was touted as an OS like Unix but better. .
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Did MS actually *write* xenix, or just license it?
Regarding NT...
First, NT stands for "New Technology". It is a coincidence that "WNT" is offset by one from "VMS".
NT had some of the same designers as VMS.
NT was new. It is not based on unix.
NT *is* cool, and has done some cool things since day one. Do not confuse the NT kernel with the abortion of an operating environment Microsoft chose to build with it. As a kernel, it's very cool in many ways.
Yes, I mean cooler than unix.
I dug out my copy of the 2K resource kit cd, and located in the posix folder is the following:
cat.exe, chmod.exe, chown.exe, cp.exe, find.exe, grep.exe, ln.exe, ls.exe, mkdir.exe, mv.exe, rm.exe, rmdir.exe, sh.exe, touch.exe, vi.exe, wc.exe
and in the source folder, you can find:
ar, bsdpsx, cat, cc, chmod, chown, devsrv, elvis, find, grep, include, ld, ln, ls, lstlib, make, man, makedir, mk-rules, mv, pax, rm, rmdir, sh, term, touch and wc.
NT isn't in any way derivative of MS's UNIX experience. It's a clear derivative of VMS, and a direct derivative of Prism.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
I'm sorry, do I understand this correctly? Microsoft's problems are being blamed on having to learn vi? The editor that thousand of script kiddies have managed to learn well enough to sabotage Unix systems worldwide?
To understand my disbelief, take a look at the old MS-DOS editor edlin if you want to see a learning curve. It's essentially the same as "ed", which for those who don't know (I'm sure it's a very small group around here -- Or so I hope) is vi without being full screen. That's right, a line-editor, which you can use on teletypes.
edlin's learning curve is dramatically worse than vi's because you have to learn how to think non-linearly. You have to know how to visualize a file that you can't see all at once, or you end up displaying blocks of lines repeatedly - On a teletype, that wastes a lot of paper. On a CRT, it just wastes a lot of time.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
DOS is a (bad) Unix clone: Pipes, redirection, devices which act like files. (/dev/null becomes NUL:, /dev/console is CON:, etc.) Of course, DOS isn't multitasking (though you can fake it with TSRs) so pipes dump their contents into a temp file and then feed the data to another program.
Windows is basically a clone of Motif, as far as the widgets go; It looks pretty bad, even compared to Motif, but it behaves in pretty much the same way. Minimize to icon, the drop-down menu in the upper-left of the window that you can double-click to close... Most of this stuff has been carried into the windows we know (and usually love or hate, with very little in between, like any other OS) today.
As for Xenix: I'm minimally annuated as far as Unix geeks go, and so my first experience with it was when SCO was the only company putting it out. I ran Xenix 2.3.2 on a 286-6MHz with 1MB of ram and a 40MB RLL disk. I mostly used vi, uucp, and cu. This was enough to call BBSes and get mail and news delivered to my PC. Clearly it was superior in basically every way when compared to MS-DOS, except for ease of use.
If Microsoft had created an unencumbered version of "Xenix" at the time, we could have had a very different experience. As it is, we got stuck with DOS and all that that has put us through until the modern day. Instead of simply changing binary formats and having a new kernel with a good compatibility layer for older versions of the binaries, like Unix, we got a rock.
And it's not even shiny.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The National Exhibition Centre ("NEC") in Birmingham, England had an inventory system running on Xenix in 1988. There were 5-10 terminals across the site, mostly Wyse VT terminals plus the console (VGA graphics).
I think the system was called "Impact" but I'm not sure. It had some problems in the UI with a large data set (all character-based graphics of course).
I got a job there as a student in my second year at University doing data entry. We would read an entry from a Kalamazoo paper based inventory book like "Rubber grommet, 1/16 cubit, 12.50/100, 12.5% discount, Acme Grommets" and convert it to a price each (yes, we had to throw away information) and enter it into the new system by hand.
I worked on the console of the server which was a 10MHz AT-clone which ran "like shit off a shovel" according to the vendor rep.
Every night I would back up the whole system to tape. I think it was a 250MB QIC cartridge, but I'm not sure. I know they had that distinctive metal plate on one side (a Travan NS20 is quite similar, but smaller, and 10GB).
In my lunch-hours I would read about strange things like "Bourne Shell" and "echo".
It was the first multi-user system I ever used so we all had fun looking at each others files.
I seem to remember making a directory called personal, which contained another called private, and in there a file called readme.txt, which contained only the words "aren't you nosy". Someone asked me about that within a week.
The Word processor was quite nice for the day and called "Lyrix". Unix systems in those days had real printed manuals which is good for beginners who don't know their way around. All the messages that Lyrix used could be overriden in a text file, so again we had a lot of fun with that.
I seem to remember I was being paid 100 pounds a week in total for a full-time job, and paying rent and running a car out of that. I lost quite a bit of weight that summer.
This is a myth which was started by R.E. Ballard in the comp.os.linux.advocacy group back in around 1995. It's not been corroborated by anybody else, and Mr. Ballard refuses to provide any evidence to substantiate it, although he did once claim that it was so important to SCO that they reported it as an Asset in their annual reports.
Given Mr. Ballard's propensity for exagerration and lying, I really would not lend any credence to this story. It may very well be true, but if it is, the consequences of it would surely not be nearly as far reaching as Mr. Ballard's claim.
"False" Myth? As opposed to one of those "True" Myths?
Oh, I get it. It's one of those oxymoron jokes, like "Microsoft Works."
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
Sorry for being off topic. You will have to excuse me I have (blissfully) not had to use Windows for several years - I have made my living since I graduated from university in 1992 using Linux/UNIX. I wasn't aware that MS had something equivilent to symbolic links. What do they call them? Are they just as flexible as under unix?
Most likely, what killed Xenix was AT&T's licensing fees--it's hard to see how such a premium priced system could have caught on with normal users, in particular at a time where people expected their OS to just "come" with the computer for free and nobody else was offering something as nice and expensive as UNIX. Many other great software systems have been killed by the desire of their creators to milk the market early and often with "breakthrough platforms". Smalltalk80, CommonLisp, and NeXTStep all priced themselves out of the market. Gates has the right business idea: make it cheap and simple and tighten the screws once you have a monopoly and people can't jump ship anymore.
I find this particular report rather dubious, however:
"Anyway, when I worked there back in the mid 80's every poor sod in the company from Bill down to the mail clerks had a Xenix terminal on their desk and used it daily for email at least. Meaning every poor sod had to master vi before they could request vacation time (and everyone wonders why Microsoft is such a hateful cramped little place.)
As opposed to what? The text editor that came with DOS? It seems to me they should have been so lucky as to get "vi". If Microsoft didn't like it, they could have developed whatever you think they did was so much better for DOS. And where did "vi" even come from? Xenix derives from 7th Edition UNIX, and I don't remember "vi" coming standard with 7th edition UNIX. If Xenix had "vi", someone must have decided that it was a good idea to backport it.
There are lots of reasons to like vim over vi, but for me the big one is GUI integration. Running vi under X-Windows is a nightmare, unless you're better than I am at remembering to go into insert mode before pasting. Vim, by contrast, talks directly to clipboard. And using vim under Windows and X-Windows is pretty much the same.
But given Mister Bill's fondness for gee-whiz technology (is it true that the famous mansion needs 50 NT servers to keep from falling down?) I suspect he does everything in MS office -- and spends a good chunk of each day hacking VBA macros!
If it is indeed true that Microsoft was running on Xenix up until Windows 3.1, it casts an interesting light on how flexible Bill's vision of the future was right up until the early 90s.
Funny, that. When I was at MS from 94 to 95 or so, there were still quite a few Xenix systems around in the "Business Systems" group or whatever the hell they were calling it then. I found it particularly humorous because I was working on the MS Exchange Server project, and here my co-workers were using Xenix mail. Some folks apparently wanted to *read* their email, not just to "eat dogfood"
When I think what MS *could* have done with the amount of development effort that went into MSExchange v. 1.0^H^H^H 4.0, if they had applied it to Xenix mail... We'd have rock-solid secure email that'd be delivered before it was sent, managed by a system running on a 486 with 16mb ram, hosting 10,000 accounts. Instead, we have memory leaks, a GUI designed by Smurfs, and secure coding philosophies that led to inclusion of auto-executing-content as message body (= by-design vehicle for viruses, which we reported internally in the company in '95). What a waste.
The hell with it, I'm buying a Mac.
I think not...(*poof*)
Bah ! i dont think MS had the right to run a distro of nix they wanna wipe them out .. well i believe *nix is wiping the floor with MS . heh anyways peace
Yours Truly, Wes -- Owner
Their writing style sucks! It hurts to read this crap.
And ran mail and news in the mid 80's. Brian Reid got us a UUCP feed from a real TCP/IP connected site - JPL, and put gryphon.com on the usenet backbone, no doubt helping to lead to it's demise .
Xenix worked perfectly well; we fed news and mail to over a hundred downstream sites with UUCP and had a doezen news peers.
If you look at old usenet postings in Google, anything that was gryphon.com or gryphon.cts.com came from that lowly i286 development system running Xenix administered by Greg Laskin (who died in 1990). Gryphon.com posters were constantly in the top 25 bandwidth wasters postings that K*net Paul Dolan annoyed everybody with.
Whether it had a chance on the desktop depends on whose desk it was on.
Need Mercedes parts ?
And I didn't like it all. I would take Linux or FreeBSD any day over Xenix.
Their older system, SLM, was about equivalent to cvs, and perhaps slightly better. Its main trouble was ease of use; the first time I ever had to use SLM, it took me a week to get it set up because the documentation was wrong and I was in a remote location.
Their newer version control is called "Source Depot", and it's got a really cool trick: transactional checkins. Add two files, change three others, and delete one, all in a single operation. Once again, ease of use, poor documentation, and lack of training are real killers, which is a shame because the system is SO DAMNED COOL if you only understand it.
Why exactly do you call vi rudimentary? By your account you have learned only the bare minimum about vi - the functionality it shares with DOS EDIT.COM or Pico. Your grasp of vi is rudimentary, but if you increase your understanding you may come to understand that vi is very productive. I wonder what you consider 'non-rudimentary'. If it's EMACS, I won't try to argue because that's a religion. But if it's some GUI thing, you're probably fooling yourself. I've watched a lot of people using a lot of tools, and nobody using a GUI is as fast as a fast vi user. Crawling is easier than walking but once you learn to walk you generally don't go back.
Vi isn't 'rudimentary' - it is possibly sailing right over your head. It encourages more abstract commands like 'delete 3 words' or 'go to line 2511' or 'change everything up to the period to "this year"' rather than the too-low-level commands of a GUI editor: "move down one line. again. again
On a more positive note, I hope you continue to learn vi. Perhaps your 'Eureka' experience is still in the future.
I disagree, just as I disagree with the people who wish IBM had pushed OS/2 better. I'm really glad to have Linux, and there's no way a corporation would have created something like that. By fumbling so badly, the corporations created a vacuum into which Linux stepped. Corporations have an incredible gift for ruining software - even something like Unix that's good at the core was being ruined by the commercial Unix vendors.
Likewise, I am incredibly grateful to Bill Gates for helping to create a world of standardized cheap hardware which made Linux possible. Can you imagine how it would suck if there were 25 popular computer architectures, all proprietary, closed, shitty, with their own proprietary OS's that were bastardized versions of DOS or SCO? And I'm grateful to him for making his software so unattractive to smart people that we swarmed to Linux.
When I look at the modern history of computing I almost believe in God. It's as if everything were arranged perfectly to create the wonderful situation we have today.
the probability of godwin's law being invoked has exceeded that of Hitler or Nazi's being mentioned.
We need a new law.
However I do agree with the author that the current buzz around "xml databases" is an attempt to revive a failed technology (hierarchical db) under a new coat of paint. I don't mean to condemn such things completely - I recently implemented such a database at work as a very minor adjunct to our relational databases - but they can only be used within their niche, which assumes that a record is always retrieved by its key. Such structures lack the reporting flexibility of the relational database.
Anyhow, Mr. Pascal goes on to criticize data warehousing:He seems to ignore the real-world considerations that drive data warehousing. If you're going to run tons of queries on a static set of data (no more inserts or updates) it's faster to denormalize the data first. Why should companies have to buy beefier hardware to keep their data warehouse "truly relational"? Second, the reporting programmers might not feel like wrapping their minds around a four-table outer join on unfamiliar tables just to get the most basic report. Letting the data model be the king is great when there's only one data model. Since the data warehouse works with every data model in the enterprise, it's more logical to flatten the data on intake.
...you might give Taco a reason to start censoring /.
Not that I care.
Actually, there are many people at MS who use vi or vim. My boss prefers emacs to Visual Studio. I prefer VS.NET, but I've used vi, and it gets installed with my team's dev tools, along with a whole bunch of old familiar Unix-like tools.
This really shouldn't surprise anyone. Coming from a CS background (Linux and Solaris), and growing up using DOS, I'm used to both sets of command-line tools. I'm sure BillG is, too. He wrote some of them.
Just because I work at Microsoft doesn't mean I don't understand what is important to geeks like the kind here at Slashdot. I just want to use my skills to improve the software that the most people use. More people use MS software, so that's why I'm here. I've been here less than a year, but if you look around MS, you'll find a lot of others here for the same reason.
Regarding your sig:
Please review your second grade English class notes, specifically the section under the heading "To vs. Too vs. Two". Thanks.
Still, I don't think there were lots of clones (yet) by the time MSDOS 2.0 came around, so it's probably more accurate to talk about PCDOS
Pax actually is in the WINNT\SYSTEM32 folder, too.
Rename it to tar.exe or posix.exe and you see it
works as intended, too.
It even has ancient BSD RCSID strings in it.
But heck, where can I download that CD?
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
What sig might this be?
Now, i'm not trying to troll either but...
/. a few weeks ago, an engineer on IE was talking about why NS "lost" the browser war.
if I recall an article I read on
He was talking about how they started from scratch, and how you're always better off keeping your code, bloated as it is, and letting hardware catch up (Word just seems to scream this).
I think he makes some good points in favor of his argument, but, this does seem to be the general philosophy of MS (And that probably came down directly from Gates).
The thing is, he's got the market share to backup this software philosophy. I don't agree with it, but it doesn't always matter if you bribed the refs. In the end, all that matters is what's on the scoreboard.
The MS-DOS directories (rather than having the disk have one directory) did come from Unix. There was a trade paper article at the time where Gates stated it was from Unix and they intended in the future to add many more of the abilities of Unix to MS-DOS.
hawk, who understands that if windows is the answer, you asked the wrong question
Last I heard (this was true years ago) MS held a 20% stake in SCO.
The A/UX thing always mystified me.
Here, they had a real Unix, with a decent filesystem and the nicest GUI around, and they just walked away from it, telling their clients with Appleshare Pro (Appleshare on A/UX) to replace their machines with a non-preemptively scheduled OS and an extremely fragile file system and a horribly unstable architecture for loading third party system extensions. Of course for file service the new PPC machines were not very much faster than the A/UX machines despite having much, much faster hardware -- because of the inferior OS.
In the mean time, NT really began to steamroller Novell around the same time,mainly based on its suitability for hosting applications (it still can't hold a candle to Novell for file service). Yet A/UX would have been far superior to NT for hosting applications. Of course, then the Internet exploded, and Apple could have been right there with an admin friendly Unix ready to take advantage of all the free software that makes the Internet run.
i used to work for radio shack back in '95-96 and the backoffice machine in each company owned store was xenix based. the individual pc's that stood for pos stations were dec machines, and they were apparently just running as dumb terminals to the host machine. just wondering if anyone else knew anything about their old system...
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away