Slashdot Mirror
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.
"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
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.
[
If I remember correctly my Dad's GP surgery (England) used to use Xenix
DOS 2.0 included Unixy features like file descriptors (instead of the old FCB file control blocks), directories, and devices as files (COM1:, LPT0:, etc) that weren't present in DOS 1.0.
Unfortunately, my memory fails as to whether this was still IBM PCDOS or MSDOS. I'm thinking by that time it was MSDOS.
yy dd p
but those had already found their way into CPM. You could do many unixy things in CPM on machines with at least a few 64k pages.
DOS 1.0 was PCDOS unless you ran it on a DEC rainbow or a few other very rare boxes. MSDOS was later.
Of course the 1.0 and 2.0 syscals are still in win 2002 or whatever its called.
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
Origins of Unix
I also worked on Siemens SINIX and most of the kernel includes were (C) Microsoft Corporation :)
"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
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.
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)
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
IBM TSX and MPX Late 60's Ran on an IBM 1800 mainframe and was designed as multi-tasking O/S for process control. It ran many of the various chemical plants etc. in the US and Canada for years.
But none of the 'innovations' you cite came out of UNIX. The closest one would be Kerberos, but even that was conceived from day one as being independent of the O/S. MIT has developed enough O/S to know that there is more than one.
UNIX was not an O/S with lots of innovative features, the main innovation was the idea that most of the O/S could be written in a high level language. Most of the advances in UNIX consisted of removing unnecessary junk from Multics or ITS.
UNIX was not the first O/S with symbolic links, it was however the first where the feature was widely used. There is even a way to create symlinks in VMS, although you have to go through an API to do it.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Actually "NT" has a double meaning. Its primary meaning was "N-Ten", because Windows NT was being developed initially only for the Intel i860 chipset, which was code-named "N10". Later, when it was decided NT would run on other platforms, the term "New Technology" was used. At least, this is what I've read.
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.
MSK
>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!!!
He speaks before he knows... People like this give software engineers bad names. It is so obvious he hasn't looked at the Unix API... The wait() call is a central part of Unixes, since day one. Signals, semaphores, mutexes, they are used abundantly in Unixes. Whoever posted this should be tarred and feathered..
I program both Windows and Unix, and have written OS Wrappers which allow me to port my applications between OS's. Everything you can do in Windows OS's can be done in Unix. Threads, Processes, Semaphores, Mutexes, Spin-Locks, Signals, memory maps, pipes, timers, etc. To make assertions that Windows uses WaitForObject, etc. is a ridiculous one. I would use semaphores or mutexes to co-ordinate two threads.
Personally I find the Unix OS much more straight forward and easier to design for. Microsoft keeps on making programming more and more esoteric, more difficult to understand. I use COM all over the place, and have started to port COM to Linux. It is nice, but it is not anything new, it is basically dynamic libraries with a known exported interface which exports class factories. I write low-level, often device drivers, or interfaces to video capture devices for DVD burning software. I use DirectShow which is a layer on COM. I find COM beneficial for some things and think Linux needs a similar framework.
Michael A. Uman
Sr Software Engineer
softwaremagic.net
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.
That's just off the top of my head. Things beside these I can usually find in New Riders' book Vi IMproved -- Vim
Good luck. I use VIM almost exclusively for my editing needs; over the last ten years it has been my constant companion through thick and thin. I wouldn't work without it.
Finding God in a Dog