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History of Xenix – Microsoft's Forgotten Unix-Based Operating System
- criddell 10y agoI seem to recall that when Microsoft sold Xenix, they agreed to never enter the Unix market again. I've searched for that online but have never been able to find more information.
- gtk40 10y agoObviously it looks very different today, but if they had made such an agreement, would things like the Linux sunsystem in Windows 10 or the older Windows Services for UNIX not be a problem?
- criddell 10y agoI think they might be. On the other hand, SCO isn't the company they used to be, so who knows if it would even be an issue.
- jacquesm 10y agoXenix is not so much forgotten as it simply not spoken of because of it being tainted by association with SCO.
- grahamm 10y agoAs soon as I saw that kernel boot screen in the article it was like seeing an old friend. I look back on my years at SCO(C) very fondly. Seeing what happened when Caldera (SCOX) got involved deeply saddens me. I always wonder what would have happened if the SCO OS development had turned from SVR UNIX to Linux how different things may have been.
- cstross 10y agoI seem to recall there was a Linux binary loader for OpenServer, along with the Skunkworks project ...? Yeah. Management dropped the ball big-time in 1994. SCO could have been Red Hat really easily if they'd had even a tiny amount of vision. Instead they missed the bus, went into terminal decline, and ended up split between Borland (the good bits) and the ambulance chasers from Utah (the bad bits, who everybody remembers).
- bogomipz 10y agoWho are the ambulance chasers? Caldera?
- cstross 10y agoYup. Caldera started as a legit Linux distro circa 1994-5, but burned through their funds too quickly. As a pivot they bought out Digital Research including their anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft (for blocking Win95 from running atop DR-DOS). They won big, and the rest is history -- they used a chunk of the funds to buy what they thought was SCO's IP rights, then sued IBM (because that never ends badly, right?).
- vram22 10y agoHow did it actually end? or has it even ended? (I know that cases sometimes go on for years, and I vaguely remember reading something about it lately.) I tracked what was happening for a while, at the time - just out of interest - mainly via Pamela Jones' groklaw site, but don't think I read about the end.
- digi_owl 10y agoLast i read the zombie was still stumbling about...
- cmrdporcupine 10y agoI worked sysadmin contract at an IBM global services subsidiary in the summer of 1997. I had a task that needed a Unix machine and I installed Linux on it. One of the senior mgmt type people threw up a big fuss about it being Linux and Linux being bad, m'kay, bad stuff, and insisted that the machine should be running a licensed SCO Unix. He ended up getting outvoted but I remember even in 1997 being like "what year is it?" The next year or the year after IBM announced their big Linux pivot where they went all-in on Linux on everything as a big strategy.
- hapless 10y agoSCO and Caldera were a merger that should never have happened. SCO made all of its money off of line items in very expensive deals done by channel sales guys who integrated complex products. Caldera made all of its money by going into shops with SCO-based point-of-sales or industrial control or what-have-you, and cutting the integrators/resellers out of the loop. Putting those two businesses under one roof was doomed to failure.
- anexprogrammer 10y agoNot forgotten here. My second job had some TRS80 68000 systems running Xenix and 6-10 terminals. > Slowly, Microsoft started losing interest in Xenix It seemed more like they lost interest the moment it was released.
- arethuza 10y agoI remember working on 286 based systems with multiple users on serial terminals running SQL based database applications.
- cstross 10y agoI worked as a tech author on the release notes for the last shipped release of Xenix, SCO Xenix 2.3.4, in late 1991. The Microsoft legacy lingered in SCO's codebase for a long time -- the MS C compiler was standard right through Open Server (disclaimer: I left in 1995 and happily never had to use that festering dungheap ever again, much less write and maintain chunks of the docset for it).
- Turing_Machine 10y agoI used to make some decent side money maintaining a Xenix records and billing system for a local doctor. It's been a long time, but I remember the system as being pretty solid.
- simonh 10y agoImagine a Windows based on Unix, like OSX, instead of being a derivative of VMS. It could so easily have happened.
- ryao 10y agoIt could still happen given the work Microsoft Research did on Drawbridge. It is public knowledge that they use it on Azure and with Drawbridge, they could rebase on UNIX. I doubt that it would happen given that Microsoft's modus operandi is to make as much money as possible by trying to lock people into their products, with Windows being the primary product on which they want people to be dependent.
- simonh 10y agoWow, just looked up Drawbridge. It's a shame MS Research stuff rarely goes anywhere. That looks like top-shelf engineering.
- contextfree 10y agoIn this case they shipped. The Windows Subsystem for Linux is based on the picoprocess design that originated with Drawbridge. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2016/05/23/pico-process-overview/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2016/05/23/pico-process...
- pjmlp 10y agoThat is a misconception. Drawbridge powers the pico kernels infrastructure on Windows and is the basis of the new Ubuntu/Windows subsystem. The research in Singularity and Midori were used in MDIL compilers targeting .NET AOT native code generation on Windows 8.x and the follow up changes that lead to .NET Native. Also F# started as a MS Research project. The theorem provers used to validate Windows drivers were also a MS Research project. LINQ, .NET contracts and Fakes framework also started as MS Research projects. Some Haskell and OCaml researchers are on MS Research payroll. There are tons of other examples.
- nixos 10y ago
- david-given 10y agoThat's not much of an article --- this one has a lot more information: http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Torvalds/Finland_period/xenix_microsoft_shortlived_love_affair_with_unix.shtml http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Torvalds/Finland_period/x... pcjs.org has a Xenix image in its library, but no preconfigured example. Anyone know enough about pcjs to set one up?
- throw2016 10y agoFascinating, missed this earlier. There is a lot of revisionism today and I think Gates always gets the short end of the stick. It took a lot of work to build Microsoft and the PC industry with it. Hopefully in later years he will be redeemed. Given the first instinct is always to be closed and profit the openness of the PC ecosystem must have taken gargantuan effort to build. Gates clearly believed in more accessibility, affordability and wider outreach for computing than closed systems in some deeper way, whatever his motives and the outcome on hindsight completely blew open the floodgates. Thanks to that we have open systems on PCs instead of closed blackboxes and a massively rich ecosystem. This in itself is an impressive achievement.
- pjmlp 10y agoPeople tend to forget before the PC all the other systems had vendor specific hardware and with OSes being burned in ROMs, upgrading meant buying a new computer, sounds familiar? Also, back in the day, at least in Portugal, many of us dreamed to work at Microsoft and usually applied to work there at the end of the CS degree.
- SixSigma 10y agoI have a machine with the OS burned in ROM (BBC Micro). I can use and EEPROM and write my own if I want to. I can also switch between ROMs to boot from - I have BBC Basic, Word*, Publisher, Forth. It was a great idea when you only have 32K RAM. The ROMs are page mapped in.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
- ryao 10y agoI would not call Xenix a forgotten Operating System. I sent Steve Ballmer an email when he was still CEO of Microsoft asking if they were ever going to do a new release of Xenix. He replied no.
- cstross 10y agoThat would be because Microsoft sold the rights to Xenix to SCO -- at that time about two hackers and their hot tub in downtown Santa Cruz -- in return for 30% of the shares in the (then private) company. That was in the mid-to-late 80s (before my time there).
- bogomipz 10y agoWhat's the "where are they now" on the two hackers in S.C with the hot tub?
- chiph 10y agoRan it in college, on an Intel iPSC. I didn't know at the time that it was a Microsoft product, as it had been licensed and rebranded by Intel. And probably tweaked to run on the compute nodes.
- adekok 10y agoI'm reminded of a story Hugh Daniel told me about Xenix. Hugh and John Gilmore visited Microsoft around the time of Sun 1, to see if there was anything they could learn / exchange. The Microsoft guys asked excitedly how they made SunOS so fast on the limited hardware. Hugh and John looked at each other, shrugged, and said "Caching?". The response was "Oh no, we tried that. It didn't work." Hugh and John concluded there was nothing to learn here.
- nolok 10y agoThe follow up is that sun ended up having trouble making money and sold to Oracle, while Microsoft ended up being a juggernaut who even in its bad time stayed one of the most stable and lucrative company in the world.
- HillRat 10y agoTo be fair, Sun outlasted its market; the problem was that *nix desktop companies were targeting $10K "3M" workstations and ignoring the PC market (which offered a tenth of the capability at a tenth of the price). When consumer machines caught up and replaced technical and academic workstations, Microsoft was able to grow with the market, while Sun, SGI, etc. didn't have the same opportunity to "grow down." That left Sun dependent on the server market, and exposed to the first dot-com collapse and subsequent glut of used mid- and high-end systems on the aftermarket.
- outside1234 10y agoThere are some good reasons why caching might not have worked for Microsoft you know... The much smaller memory size of a typical PC being a bit potential reason.
- thesimpsons1022 10y agoeasier to just be condescending instead of thinking that out.
- icedchai 10y ago
- pjmlp 10y agoXenix was my first contact with UNIX, back in 1993.
- bryanlarsen 10y agoThe story I heard was that the reason MS-DOS stagnated for a while in the mid-80s was that Microsoft considered Xenix "the future". Then the legal uncertainty around Unix copyrights started happening and the need for a cross-platform system evaporated because PC's won, so Microsoft shifted to Windows and OS/2 as its future.
- jacquesm 10y agoOS/2 was produced by IBM, not MS.
- terrymah 10y agoIt was a joint project, with ms eventually pulling out to work on NT
- bryanlarsen 10y agoNT was originally known as OS/2 3.0.
- azinman2 10y agoPre-warp then. Those WARP commercials made me really want it when I was a kid, even though they (on purpose) never communicated what was so amazingly bout it.
- jacquesm 10y agoAh yes, that's true. Totally forgot about that. Thanks!
- yuhong 10y agoIndeed, that OS/2 2.0 fiasco went so badly that it is one of the favorite topics.
- pskisf 10y agoTRS-XENIX was Tandy's implementation for their Model 16/6000 MC68000 based line of business machines. Here's a video of my working Tandy 6000 system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mM1IH8frd_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mM1IH8frd_U
- hapless 10y agoIn the 1980s, XENIX 286 was able to use the 286 protected mode to deliver real protected memory and pre-emptive multitasking on a PC-AT. That more or less guaranteed a certain market share, because a PC-AT was a lot cheaper than anything with a 68k or a 386. Xenix was successful because it delivered a lot of bang for the buck. It ran on relatively inexpensive hardware and delivered a lot of UNIX flavor despite the limitations. Really early versions of Xenix would run on an actual 8086, with no protected memory whatsoever. I don't think any other UNIX ever managed that.
- memracom 10y agoBack then I built systems with Xenix on a PC-AT that had three simultaneous users, one on the console and two WYSE-60 terminals attached to the serial ports. The system ran a database server and the applications that I built to manage factory inventory and orders. Mind you, on a 4.77 Mhz PC at home, I ran Windows 1.0 and used it to multitask two sessions. In the foreground GUI I used Notepad to write C code, while the DOS session in the background ran the compiler. Back then compiling took a long time. Few people even then realized that Windows 1.0 did real pre-emptive multitasking on the original IBM-PC between the front-end GUI and a backend DOS session.
- yuhong 10y agoIt was not preemptive.
- xenadu02 10y agoIt depends. The Windows 3.x 386 "enhanced" mode kernel was in fact what we would call a "hypervisor" today. A 32-bit hypervisor to be specific. It ran 16-bit Windows applications inside one VM, along with any number of DOS VMs. The VMs themselves were preemptively multitasked, but the design of the 16-bit Windows API prevented preemption in that VM (a problem also faced by Apple). If you weren't using an "real-mode" drivers then it never bothered to talk to DOS, it just did everything itself... for example the "32-bit disk mode" stuff was a 32-bit disk and filesystem driver that completely replaced DOS disk routines. Microsoft being Microsoft, if you had DOS TSRs, DOS drivers, or other random DOS crap they would hook those things and drop down to real mode to call them the way they expected to be called... going so far as synchronizing the DOS in-memory data structures before and after the calls to make sure the lie was as complete as possible.
- jbgreer 10y agoXenix ran on the master node of the Intel iPSC, a commercial hypercube used for parallel computation starting in the mid-to-late 80s. The compute nodes used a proprietary OS. I also worked for a retailer that used SCO Xenix for Point of Sale and other applications. 386/16s and 386/20s with 16, 24 or 32 port serial boards running serial printers and dumb terminals. Fun times.
- TimJYoung 10y agoI also worked for a retailer with a very similar setup (I wonder if it was the same one). It was amazing how many terminals you could sling on to a 386/20 and still have the whole thing work. The retail software was custom-written C that used a UI toolkit/library for the screens, but the name of the toolkit escapes me. I was in support at the time and didn't actually code the software, so I have no problem saying that it was a hot mess. :-) I managed to grab some SCO Xenix installation floppy disks when I left (they had moved on to Netware/MS-DOS at that point, so the disks were just going to get thrown out). I still have them around somewhere...
- pmontra 10y ago> Even though it came first, Unix was probably more powerful than MS-DOS. This is the understatement of the decade. Of course it was more powerful. I used Xenix in 1987 on an IBM PC, probably a 80286. It was a Xenix/MS-DOS dual booting system. Multiuser and multitasking with Xenix or single user and monotask with MS-DOS. I used various flavors of Unix on Z8000 or 68k architectures in those years. All of them were obviously better than MS-DOS.
- jack_rabbit 10y agoYou beat me to it. I was just about to point out that ridiculous sentence.
- sxcurry 10y agoThe entire article is incoherent.
- gravypod 10y agoHey I know this is super off topic but can you please email me? I'm in the process of fixing an old computer (an i486 'portable' system) and I need to find some stuff to get it up and running. I'm looking for someone who can point me to where I can find a bootable 5 1/4 drive to see if my IO card is good. I have asked a few professors at my college but all of them have cleaned out their old hardware. I know this may be strange but there aren't many people left that can debug these kinds of systems. Sorry for disturbing this thread!
- pmontra 10y agoThose computers I wrote about are gone a long time ago. I don't know where to look for those components. Maybe ebay?
- gravypod 10y agoI've looked, nothing bootable sadly. I hope some day someone sees this message and emails me. I'd be willing to pay at least 10 bucks + shipping for a DOS image or something.
- jecel 10y agohttps://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-06 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-06 has a very good description of Xenix starting on page 248. This was just before the IBM PC was announced. In page 286 of https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-11-rescan https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-11-rescan one of the main advantages of MS-DOS 2.0 is supposed to be its Xenix compatibility. That is why MS-DOS 1 had CP/M style system calls while MS-DOS 2 added Unix style ones. At that time Microsoft was thinking that eventually MS-DOS and Xenix would be merged into a single operating system (I read it in yet another Byte article but can't look for it right now) but things ended up going in a different direction.
- bogomipz 10y agoAlso a similar bit of history is that Apple had a Unix as well called A/UX: http://www.aux-penelope.com/ http://www.aux-penelope.com/
- nickpsecurity 10y agoOne thing INFOSEC people might find interesting about Xenix is the re-implementation done by Trusted Information Systems: Trusted Xenix. It was the first, certified, security-oriented UNIX that had a combo of features for extra security plus backward compatibility with Xenix apps. These included trusted path, mandatory controls, integrity controls to limit viral damage, some suppression of covert channels, and especially their solution to setuid problem. That they published a solution while mainstream UNIX just kept the problem around was an early illustration of a recurring problem in mainstream INFOSEC where prior, proven solutions get ignored. Here's the evaluation report with all of its security features and such for anyone interested in learning about it. Or comparing it to security of modern UNIX's: http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/virtual_disk_library/index.cgi/1347159/FID1806/library/fers/csc-epl-92-001-a.ps http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/virtual_disk_library/index.c... Particularly interesting to compare it to SELinux, FreeBSD w/ SEBSD, or OpenBSD.
- bitwize 10y agoXenix was the tits back in the day, and the first Unix I ever worked with. Because of TRS-XENIX, the Tandy Model 16 (essentially a Model II kitbashed with a 68000 daughtercard with 512 KiB or so of RAM) was the only desktop workstation computer not made by Sun that could run Unix in 1982.
- YZF 10y agoI used Xenix briefly and did some tinkering including writing a device driver. Just remember it as being a pleasant but mostly useless ;) Now I think this was on IBM's PC/RT but Googling I can't find much. At any rate I'm pretty sure it was some "special" PC variant. Anyone remembers that one? There were quite a few other oddball "PC" platforms like the one that ran VM/CMS and was like a little 370 mainframe in a PC box. I think that one was PC/370 or something.
- YZF 10y agoLooks like the PC/RT was AIX .. Yet another Unix. Perhaps my Xenix machine was just a standard PC then...
- alabamamike 10y agoI don't think it is forgotten by all of us in IT! I once had the dubious distinction of supporting/administrating a 20 user Xenix system (Compaq server with numerous VT-100 terminals attached.) Solid system until it wasn't ... the Compaq hardware was always less reliable than the OS, however!
- twic 10y agoThis reminded me that Apple also had a UNIX adventure in the early '90s: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2010/9/25_A_UX.html http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...