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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.
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
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 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
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.
"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
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.