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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
...and Microsoft has Xenix.
Coincidence? I think not.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
It runs on the mach kernal, BSD & all that.
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
"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
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!!!!!!!!!
>
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)
oops - that should have been CoS- CoC is "Call of Cthulhu" (yeah I could never spell it- hence the acronym).
And who the hell modded me informative? Someone with a sense of humour, or an extremely gullible person?
graspee
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.
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
>Some day is now. Xenix became SCO UnixWare became
:). This release did include some features designed to ease transition from Openserver 5, but it was an evolution of the SVR4.2 codebase of Unixware, NOT the SVR3.2 codebase of Xenix.
>Open UNIX 8 [caldera.com].
Not quite.. As I pointed out in an earlier post Xenix became SCO UNIX which became SCO Openserver. It was originally based on V7, and later SVR2 and SVR3.2, with features from SVR4 either backported or reimplemented when it became Openserver.
Unixware was an SVR4.2 implementation SCO aquired from then owner Novell. It was sold pretty much unchanged as Unixware 2.x for several years.
In 1998 they released Unixware 7, which was touted as being the first SVR5 implementation. Since SCO now controlled the Unix codebase, they could bump the version number
The closest thing to a remaining relative would be Openserver 5.0.6, which is still marketed by Caldera.
Matt
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 am one of those people who knows the bare minimum to move around in vi, type things in, and quit and nothing else. My total knowledge of vi is i to turn on insert mode, esc to go back to command mode, x to delete characters, dd to delete a line, the arrow keys to move around, :q! to quit without writing, and :wq to write the file and quit.
I learned vi because it is the one editor that is on every single system, and also because its small enough to fit on a boot disk. However, once I learned the bare minimum I needed I quit learning about it because its simply not productive to use such a rudimentary editor when there are so many better tools available.
:wq might be obsolete, but I picked it up from the O'Reilly book, Learning The Vi Editor. Where else was I supposed to learn about it?
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
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!
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.
You know, I'm just about ready to start on EGIII (Elder God III) -- isn't that the one with the snaps and the thing with the big squid head comes out, then has everybody crammed into a small New England town with the help of tax auditors and shrinks and eats everybody?
/Brian
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".
Actually, I think the NT architecture is even weirder than that. As far as I can remember from what I've heard, NT is indeed microkernel-based (can't remember if the proper name for the original mk was Mica or Prism; I've heard both names), but they've blown so many holes in the design over the years (particularly where NT 4 moved GDI into user space) that it may as well be monolithic. (Funniest damn thing; NT was designed to be portable originally, but I seriously doubt they could go back and put XP on all the hardware NT was originally designed for; I think even WinCE was rebuilt from the ground up, wasn't it?)
And you've got OS X inside out; you're essentially correct, but the userland is specifically FreeBSD, and "some NeXTSTEP userland things" is way off the mark. OS X is NeXTSTEP/PPC with Mac compatibility and a nice coat of Bondi Blue paint.
/Brian
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.
I have always wondered if sometime microsoft is just going ditch the NT kernal, and maybe with their next version, use Mach or VMS or something for their kernal. Just like Apple did. Then finally they could claim that their product is stable.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Sometimes moderators just suck! Yes, I am very well aware that this will give me a Karma hit. Go fire!
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.
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/
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]
Don't worry, Northern Telecom doesn't hold any copyrights for Windows NT.
> can't remember if the proper name for the original mk was Mica or Prism
Microsoft oriented press usually have little regard for jornalistic quality standards, but as far as I remember this article is correct: Prism was the hardware, Mica the OS for Digital’s ‘future system’ that failed, prompting Cutler to go work at Microsoft. Interesting that these ‘future systems’ have a tendency of going seriously wrong: IBM’s gave us SQL instead of relational, and that is worse than Windows!.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
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
Doh!
Well, this is not to say they didn't do a lot of work on it themselves - the original components weren't even a working OS after all. Microsoft hired away key parts of Digital Equipments VMS team to work on it, IBM programmers worked on it for a bit too, before IBM and MS parted ways. But yeah, in essence, has MS ever innovated anything? Of course not. They buy things that have promise, polish them, and market them.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
>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.
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
The other possibility is that you're confusing NT with NeXT, but I really hope not :-).
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
No, WinCE is an NT derivative. That's not so clear now, but it was really clear in 1.0.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
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*)
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
So I decided to look at my "clear" script. It has one line with "#!/bin/sh -", 35 lines with the BSD license and warranty disclaimer, and one line with "exec tput clear".
95% of this script is copyright. Geez! I'm so glad this isn't under the GPL...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Remeber the dates.
I dont think you would have wanted to use any machine back then...
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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.
Ahh, Ok Sorry :-)
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hawk, who understands that if windows is the answer, you asked the wrong question