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Microsoft itself was a leading Unix vendor in the 1980s with Xenix. Every Microsoft developer had a Xenix workstation for things like email, access to network
by pavlov 1y ago
Microsoft itself was a leading Unix vendor in the 1980s with Xenix.
Every Microsoft developer had a Xenix workstation for things like email, access to network disks, running a decent C compiler, and debugging.
DOS was practically a single-program environment with no memory protection and no networking. Unix offered much better productivity for software developers.
Engineering in general was a field that used Unix workstations heavily. Microsoft didn’t become competitive until Windows NT in 1993.
- pjmlp 1y agoIn hindsight, Microsoft seems to have lost two opportunities to already be on the forefront from UNIX, first with giving up on Xenix, then by not really embracing the POSIX subsystem on Windows NT. Linux would never taken off in such alternative realities. Not that it matters that much now with WSL, and Azure Linux.
- zozbot234 1y agoMemory protection was not possible on the 8086 and quite half-baked on the 80286 (you could switch to protected mode but then you lost access to hardware BIOS facilities that relied on real mode, and switching back to real mode required hard-faulting the processor because there was no architectural support for it). The Intel 80386 was the first fully-featured x86 CPU wrt. running memory protected OS's.
- pjmlp 1y agoThe reason being that they thought no one would care about those legacy MS-DOS applications, everyone would be running to adopt OS/2 on 286, hence no need to go back into real mode.