7 ms·

That's not much of an article --- this one has a lot more information: http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Torvalds/Finland_period/xenix_microsoft_shortlived_lo

That'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 ago
Fascinating, 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 ago
  People 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 ago
    I 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
    ROM boot was only true of 8-bit micros. The standard for mainframes and minis was to boot an OS from tape/disk/(paper tape.) OS choices and OS upgrades happened regularly. You could run all sorts of things on a PDP/11, VAX, DG Nova, etc.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      No, it was also the way in the Amiga, Mac and Atari, the floppies only had a partial implementation, all 16 bit. As for the mainframes and minis, I never worked with them, besides the AS/400. But from my collection of old papers and manuals, many of them had "bytecodes" with microcoded execution (more higher level than plain CISC Assembly) burned on their processors.
      - digi_owl 10y ago
        Supposedly even the original PC had a BASIC boot option. And frankly, its design is not that far from the other micros (ISA cards can extend the BIOS by responding to specific memory address ranges, much like a ROM cart on a C64). Its just so damn well wallpapered over these days.
      - slrz 10y ago
        Yes, some were microcoded. And you were able to replace that microcode with your own creations! See for example this paper, where they took a VAX and rewrote its microcode so that it executed instructions for the Warren Abstract Machine, the output format of their Prolog compiler. It's like you would reprogram your Core i7 to directly consume JVM bytecode. http://hps.ece.utexas.edu/pub/gee_micro19.pdf http://hps.ece.utexas.edu/pub/gee_micro19.pdf
        pjmlp 10y ago
        Thanks for the link. I was a big Prolog fan during my degree.
- vondur 10y ago
  I don't know about that, there were a bunch of different computers systems that were available before Windows/DOS killed everything but the Mac off. That also may have been due to the fact you could get PC clones after Compaq came into being...
- nixos 10y ago
  How much of it was Gates, and how much of it was IBM and their allowing IBM-compatible hardware?
  - swift 10y ago
    Virtually all of it was IBM, both because they allowed other vendors to release PC-compatible hardware and because they did not negotiate an exclusive license for MS-DOS, allowing Microsoft to sell it to other companies. I frankly can't see giving Gates any credit for the open PC ecosystem at all; his role was pure opportunism.
    - oldmanjay 10y ago
      It's hard to make a case against Bill Gates being a massive player in the astounding success of personal computing without delving deeply into emotional reasoning, so I'm curious what feeling you have that justifies your stance. For instance, perhaps you feel having the appropriate moral tone to a vision is the requirement to deserve credit for achievement?
      - nixos 10y ago
        >It's hard to make a case against Bill Gates being a massive player in the astounding success of personal computing without delving deeply into emotional reasoning The only thing he really did was not get in the way of making billions. If not for MS, other companies would have filled its place (DR-DOS?) If not for IBM creating and then opening up the PC market?
        oldmanjay 10y ago
        If you believe that the only thing Bill Gates did was stay out of the way, you've clearly not read even a cursory survey of the history of computing. It's so dismissive I'm a little agape.
      - swift 10y ago
        I think you're reading something into my comment I didn't intend. Gates and Microsoft generally did a lot of important work that made the open PC ecosystem a long term success, but IBM is the one that created that ecosystem, and Gates took advantage of that opportunity. edit: Looking back on my original comment, I can see where I should've phrased things better. When I said I couldn't see giving Gates any credit for the open PC ecosystem, I should've said "the creation of" the open PC ecosystem. We may still disagree, but at least now we'll be on the same page about where the points of disagreement are. =)
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Given the first instinct is always to be closed and profit the openness of the PC ecosystem must have taken gargantuan effort to build. The openness of the PC ecosystem was built almost entirely on IBM's failure to legally secure it (which was neither intentional nor something for which Gates was responsible), and the willingness of third-party hardware vendors to take risks in testing the degree to which IBM had failed to legally secure it (which, again, was not something Gates was responsible for.)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- orionblastar 10y ago
  Why Gates gets the short end of the stick. Instead of buy a license to make BASIC, they wrote their own version of it. Wrote their own COBOL and FORTRAN without a license as well. This took money away from IP holders, but gave birth to a lot of Microcomputers. Before MS-DOS there was CP/M and UNIX. After selling IBM PC-DOS, Gates had MS-DOS 2.0 made for PC clones after Compaq and a few others wrote a clone BIOS. They had to reverse engineer the BIOS in one room, and build their own BIOS in another. It was the cheaper PC clones that put an end to TRS-80, CP/M, Apple //, etc. Windows was a cheap knock off of the Macintosh GUI, I used to have a blog that had an article that Bill Gates stole from Steve Jobs to make Windows because Steve Jobs would not give him permission to license the Mac OS. Sure Apple and Microsoft settled it out of court by Microsoft investing money in Apple to save it. But a lot of Apple fans don't like how Gates had cheated Jobs originally. Even if Microsoft was not the first company to invent these things, they filed for patents anyway. But I will say something positive about Gates, his monopoly created a Windows standard by forcing OEMs to pay the Windows tax per PC even if they didn't use Windows. So that killed the Amiga, Atari ST and other third parties as PC clones became so cheap in the early 1990s that the market was flooded by them. Jack Tramiel founded Commodore and got into war with other companies in the same way Steve Jobs went to war with IBM. Without Jack Tramiel and the home computer wars that lead to $200 Commodore 64 ect systems, a lot of families would not be able to afford a computer to learn on. Commodore got a primitive version of Microsoft BASIC so they got a cheap license per computer. The open system PC was IBM using off the shelf parts from Intel and other companies. Using the ISA bus for example for expansion cards.
  - slrz 10y ago
    Wrote their own COBOL and FORTRAN without a license as well. This took money away from IP holders, but gave birth to a lot of Microcomputers. What IP holders? Those of other FORTRAN implementations? So if I'm writing a C compiler I'm "taking money away" from the developers of existing compilers? Like, I'm doing something despicable, as apparently, that money belongs to them?
    - orionblastar 10y ago
      You have to remember it was in the 1970s before free and open source software existed. Back then if you wanted to use C or UNIX you had to license it from Bell Labs. If you wanted BASIC you had to license it from Dartmouth, if you wanted COBOL you had to license it from The navy and Grace Hopper, etc. Over times things have changed and free and open source versions of those languages got written. But try to make a free and open source version of the Intel Mac BIOS, try to make a clone of MacOSX, try to make a version of XCode that runs in Linux and submits apps to the Apple App Store, etc. You need an Intel Mac for that and Apple's MacOSX and XCode. So not everything is free and open source or has an alternative to it. For example Microsoft made Windows that basically stole the Mac GUI IP without permission. Windows sold so well that Apple started to have financial problems. In that case it was taking money away from Apple.
feld 10y ago
I have a qemu image of xenix that might exist on my website somewhere HTTPS://feld.me/pub
- godzillabrennus 10y ago
  Love that your homepage makes immature fart noises and has this badge on it: https://feld.me/seals/echalk.png https://feld.me/seals/echalk.png
  - feld 10y ago
    Thanks!
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
nickpsecurity 10y ago
That's awesome! Thanks for the link as it fills the big picture in nicely for me. Should be the original article given level of detail. Trips me out that NT was developed on OS/2 with mail servers running Xenix. Combined with other articles, I actually see Microsoft playing it smarter than I thought drawing from all the best tech families: 1. Create a better UNIX than UNIX. UNIX microcomputer market forms as a side-effect due to marketing. 2. Move UNIX features into CP/M in MS-DOS. 3. Clone OpenVMS architecture with enhancements and emulators for older OS's. 4. Develop on OS/2 for better reliability, pace, and inspiration. I'm sure OS/2 stuff ended up in NT past the emulator. I'd be interested in a link that went into that in detail. 5. Run mail and gateways on Xenix as UNIX was great at that sort of thing. 6. Run whole business on a single AS/400 that just gets shit done mainframe-style. 7. Replace all of the above with one product that has key attributes of all of them in usable package on cheaper hardware. They don't look as dumb now as I thought when I was younger comparing MS-DOS to BSD's or Linux. ;) re Linux The author asserts multiple times that Linux comes from Xenix somehow but didn't seem to prove it. Says the architecture, standard, and microcomputer UNIX was first done by Xenix. Then Linux did one. Past that, nothing. Is there some resource with specific evidence that Linus got Linux design aspects from Xenix as opposed to another UNIX? And my original sources said he started with Minix changing stuff in his design that didn't suit his hardware or needs. So that needs to be factored in.
- xenadu02 10y ago
  OS/2 and NT were the same codebase at one time. It was a joint IBM/Microsoft project. Windows 3.x was way more successful than Microsoft anticipated. They wanted to pivot the Win32 layer in NT to be the primary API and make the user interface more Windows-like. IBM didn't want that so they parted ways. David Cutler (designer of VMS) was the architect for NT. Many people don't know it has a single root filesystem that takes the unix philosophy even further... objects like mutexes exist in the root, not just files. Everything has full ACL support. The IO completion ports and async support were way ahead of their time. It originally even ran things like the video driver in user space. Windows 3.x being so successful almost killed everything that was great about NT. It also caused Microsoft to completely miss the mobile revolution. Success hides problems indeed.

throw2016 10y ago

Fascinating, 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 ago
People 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 ago
  I 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
  ROM boot was only true of 8-bit micros. The standard for mainframes and minis was to boot an OS from tape/disk/(paper tape.) OS choices and OS upgrades happened regularly. You could run all sorts of things on a PDP/11, VAX, DG Nova, etc.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    No, it was also the way in the Amiga, Mac and Atari, the floppies only had a partial implementation, all 16 bit. As for the mainframes and minis, I never worked with them, besides the AS/400. But from my collection of old papers and manuals, many of them had "bytecodes" with microcoded execution (more higher level than plain CISC Assembly) burned on their processors.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      Supposedly even the original PC had a BASIC boot option. And frankly, its design is not that far from the other micros (ISA cards can extend the BIOS by responding to specific memory address ranges, much like a ROM cart on a C64). Its just so damn well wallpapered over these days.
    - slrz 10y ago
      Yes, some were microcoded. And you were able to replace that microcode with your own creations! See for example this paper, where they took a VAX and rewrote its microcode so that it executed instructions for the Warren Abstract Machine, the output format of their Prolog compiler. It's like you would reprogram your Core i7 to directly consume JVM bytecode. http://hps.ece.utexas.edu/pub/gee_micro19.pdf http://hps.ece.utexas.edu/pub/gee_micro19.pdf
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        Thanks for the link. I was a big Prolog fan during my degree.
vondur 10y ago
I don't know about that, there were a bunch of different computers systems that were available before Windows/DOS killed everything but the Mac off. That also may have been due to the fact you could get PC clones after Compaq came into being...
nixos 10y ago
How much of it was Gates, and how much of it was IBM and their allowing IBM-compatible hardware?
- swift 10y ago
  Virtually all of it was IBM, both because they allowed other vendors to release PC-compatible hardware and because they did not negotiate an exclusive license for MS-DOS, allowing Microsoft to sell it to other companies. I frankly can't see giving Gates any credit for the open PC ecosystem at all; his role was pure opportunism.
  - oldmanjay 10y ago
    It's hard to make a case against Bill Gates being a massive player in the astounding success of personal computing without delving deeply into emotional reasoning, so I'm curious what feeling you have that justifies your stance. For instance, perhaps you feel having the appropriate moral tone to a vision is the requirement to deserve credit for achievement?
    - nixos 10y ago
      >It's hard to make a case against Bill Gates being a massive player in the astounding success of personal computing without delving deeply into emotional reasoning The only thing he really did was not get in the way of making billions. If not for MS, other companies would have filled its place (DR-DOS?) If not for IBM creating and then opening up the PC market?
      - oldmanjay 10y ago
        If you believe that the only thing Bill Gates did was stay out of the way, you've clearly not read even a cursory survey of the history of computing. It's so dismissive I'm a little agape.
    - swift 10y ago
      I think you're reading something into my comment I didn't intend. Gates and Microsoft generally did a lot of important work that made the open PC ecosystem a long term success, but IBM is the one that created that ecosystem, and Gates took advantage of that opportunity. edit: Looking back on my original comment, I can see where I should've phrased things better. When I said I couldn't see giving Gates any credit for the open PC ecosystem, I should've said "the creation of" the open PC ecosystem. We may still disagree, but at least now we'll be on the same page about where the points of disagreement are. =)
dragonwriter 10y ago
> Given the first instinct is always to be closed and profit the openness of the PC ecosystem must have taken gargantuan effort to build. The openness of the PC ecosystem was built almost entirely on IBM's failure to legally secure it (which was neither intentional nor something for which Gates was responsible), and the willingness of third-party hardware vendors to take risks in testing the degree to which IBM had failed to legally secure it (which, again, was not something Gates was responsible for.)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
orionblastar 10y ago
Why Gates gets the short end of the stick. Instead of buy a license to make BASIC, they wrote their own version of it. Wrote their own COBOL and FORTRAN without a license as well. This took money away from IP holders, but gave birth to a lot of Microcomputers. Before MS-DOS there was CP/M and UNIX. After selling IBM PC-DOS, Gates had MS-DOS 2.0 made for PC clones after Compaq and a few others wrote a clone BIOS. They had to reverse engineer the BIOS in one room, and build their own BIOS in another. It was the cheaper PC clones that put an end to TRS-80, CP/M, Apple //, etc. Windows was a cheap knock off of the Macintosh GUI, I used to have a blog that had an article that Bill Gates stole from Steve Jobs to make Windows because Steve Jobs would not give him permission to license the Mac OS. Sure Apple and Microsoft settled it out of court by Microsoft investing money in Apple to save it. But a lot of Apple fans don't like how Gates had cheated Jobs originally. Even if Microsoft was not the first company to invent these things, they filed for patents anyway. But I will say something positive about Gates, his monopoly created a Windows standard by forcing OEMs to pay the Windows tax per PC even if they didn't use Windows. So that killed the Amiga, Atari ST and other third parties as PC clones became so cheap in the early 1990s that the market was flooded by them. Jack Tramiel founded Commodore and got into war with other companies in the same way Steve Jobs went to war with IBM. Without Jack Tramiel and the home computer wars that lead to $200 Commodore 64 ect systems, a lot of families would not be able to afford a computer to learn on. Commodore got a primitive version of Microsoft BASIC so they got a cheap license per computer. The open system PC was IBM using off the shelf parts from Intel and other companies. Using the ISA bus for example for expansion cards.
- slrz 10y ago
  Wrote their own COBOL and FORTRAN without a license as well. This took money away from IP holders, but gave birth to a lot of Microcomputers. What IP holders? Those of other FORTRAN implementations? So if I'm writing a C compiler I'm "taking money away" from the developers of existing compilers? Like, I'm doing something despicable, as apparently, that money belongs to them?
  - orionblastar 10y ago
    You have to remember it was in the 1970s before free and open source software existed. Back then if you wanted to use C or UNIX you had to license it from Bell Labs. If you wanted BASIC you had to license it from Dartmouth, if you wanted COBOL you had to license it from The navy and Grace Hopper, etc. Over times things have changed and free and open source versions of those languages got written. But try to make a free and open source version of the Intel Mac BIOS, try to make a clone of MacOSX, try to make a version of XCode that runs in Linux and submits apps to the Apple App Store, etc. You need an Intel Mac for that and Apple's MacOSX and XCode. So not everything is free and open source or has an alternative to it. For example Microsoft made Windows that basically stole the Mac GUI IP without permission. Windows sold so well that Apple started to have financial problems. In that case it was taking money away from Apple.

feld 10y ago

I have a qemu image of xenix that might exist on my website somewhere HTTPS://feld.me/pub

godzillabrennus 10y ago
Love that your homepage makes immature fart noises and has this badge on it: https://feld.me/seals/echalk.png https://feld.me/seals/echalk.png
- feld 10y ago
  Thanks!
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

nickpsecurity 10y ago

That's awesome! Thanks for the link as it fills the big picture in nicely for me. Should be the original article given level of detail. Trips me out that NT was developed on OS/2 with mail servers running Xenix. Combined with other articles, I actually see Microsoft playing it smarter than I thought drawing from all the best tech families: 1. Create a better UNIX than UNIX. UNIX microcomputer market forms as a side-effect due to marketing. 2. Move UNIX features into CP/M in MS-DOS. 3. Clone OpenVMS architecture with enhancements and emulators for older OS's. 4. Develop on OS/2 for better reliability, pace, and inspiration. I'm sure OS/2 stuff ended up in NT past the emulator. I'd be interested in a link that went into that in detail. 5. Run mail and gateways on Xenix as UNIX was great at that sort of thing. 6. Run whole business on a single AS/400 that just gets shit done mainframe-style. 7. Replace all of the above with one product that has key attributes of all of them in usable package on cheaper hardware. They don't look as dumb now as I thought when I was younger comparing MS-DOS to BSD's or Linux. ;) re Linux The author asserts multiple times that Linux comes from Xenix somehow but didn't seem to prove it. Says the architecture, standard, and microcomputer UNIX was first done by Xenix. Then Linux did one. Past that, nothing. Is there some resource with specific evidence that Linus got Linux design aspects from Xenix as opposed to another UNIX? And my original sources said he started with Minix changing stuff in his design that didn't suit his hardware or needs. So that needs to be factored in.

xenadu02 10y ago
OS/2 and NT were the same codebase at one time. It was a joint IBM/Microsoft project. Windows 3.x was way more successful than Microsoft anticipated. They wanted to pivot the Win32 layer in NT to be the primary API and make the user interface more Windows-like. IBM didn't want that so they parted ways. David Cutler (designer of VMS) was the architect for NT. Many people don't know it has a single root filesystem that takes the unix philosophy even further... objects like mutexes exist in the root, not just files. Everything has full ACL support. The IO completion ports and async support were way ahead of their time. It originally even ran things like the video driver in user space. Windows 3.x being so successful almost killed everything that was great about NT. It also caused Microsoft to completely miss the mobile revolution. Success hides problems indeed.