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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.
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 Microsoft has Xenix.
Coincidence? I think not.
I wouldn't be surprised if he _still_ uses vi
:)
Maybe this will become the single most powerful argument in the emacs vs. vi religious war.
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.
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.
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
Whenever I try to use other editors, I keep ending up with llll or jjjj inserted in my text.
Pico does not like escapes much.
(nil)
I'll bet you get to be employee of the month a lot, too.
Oh crap. Erm... Hitler used emacs?
** Use of Hitler in Arguement Detected: AUTOMATIC LOSS **
Ok, I lose.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Bill Gates got sued by the CoC for using the copyrighted entity "Xenix"; he hasn't abandoned plans to make Xenix the #1 OS- what he is doing right now is trying to make enough money to become OTIII so the CoC will let him use the name...
graspee
Imagine being transported to another dimension somehow. A Dimension not of sight or sound but of mind.
Your standing in your bedroom/gaage/server closet/basement/dens/etc. and everything appears to be the same. You fire up your linux box. Everything seems normal, all is as it was in your original plane of exsistance.
The login prompt appears, your username/password in this counterpart universe and yours is identical, but.....
Instead of your default shell you see...
C:\
N000000000000000000000000000!!!!!!!!!
>
You might find this funny:
Xenix XP
MD
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Simple--use SourceSafe as your source code control system.
"Fall 2001 Ken Lay needs to provide something he wholly owns as loan collatoral, Cheney disappears, Coincidence?"
+10 Funny!
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*)