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Microsoft never should have dropped Xenix to invent its own OS.
by ryao 2y ago
Microsoft never should have dropped Xenix to invent its own OS.
- drewcoo 2y agoMicrosoft bought Dave Cutler so that he could reinvent his OS (VMS), which became the NT line.
- p_ing 2y agoWhy would anyone pay for Yet Another UNIX? Plus Dave Cutler hated UNIX.
- ryao 2y agoWell, Xenix was extremely popular since it was the cheapest option on x86. That said, I doubt Bill Gates would have hired Dave Cutler had he stuck to Xenix.
- RiverCrochet 2y agoOne cool thing Microsoft did with Windows NT was the whole local security model and a filesystem that supported them (NTFS), which was definitely richer than UNIX. I don't really know if other UNIXes at the time had anything more than the 16-bit uid and gid and mode bits on everything the filesystem. I wonder how it would have looked if Microsoft kept Xenix as the base and added ACLs on top of it, for example.