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.

Comments

Unix is the future.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This isn't surprising.

[saintlupus]

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

Re:Windows NT == VMS

[quark2universe]

NT is one or more steps behind VMS. Some people who were only users of VMS didn't like it because it had a clunky command line interface. BUT, under the hood, VMS was an awesome operating system. I know because I took many internals classes, and worked with it for many years as an operator, system manager, DBA, and programmer. A large reason for it not being more successful was that DEC had no marketing intelligence whatsoever. Their engineers, on the other hand, were the best. Did you know that VMS had clustering in the 1980's? Everyone else is still struggling to get that right.

Microsoft Confidential source

[brer_rabbit]

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:

#!/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# THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T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" /* SVr4.0 1.3 */
# 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 /usr/bin/tput ${1:+-T$1} clear 2> /dev/null, but you didn't hear that from me.

Microsoft's early plans for XENIX

[AdamBa]

Here is a quote from the 3rd issue of PC Magazine, June/July 1982 (which also features a review of PC-FORTH by some dude named Eric Raymond)...this is from Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder:

"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

First Unix/Xenix

[presearch]

In 1979 all that existed of Xenix was a silver brochure from Microsoft
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 /usr/games
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.