4 ms·
I wonder what would have happened if Xenix was the successor to DOS. We would probably be living in a completely different computing world today.
by zatkin 13y ago
I wonder what would have happened if Xenix was the successor to DOS. We would probably be living in a completely different computing world today.
- kjs3 13y agoI have my doubts M$ was really that keen on that path; after all, there's a lot of stuff in Xenix that M$ wouldn't own and that's always been a problem for Gates and the boys. So OS/2 for a while was the heir apparent, which would have also changed things quite a bit (for good, I think, but many disagree). What we got was stepchild of VMS, which also could have been great, but has wandered off in it's own direction.
- rbanffy 13y agoThe possibility of running Xenix-native binaries elsewhere would negate much of Microsoft's later strategy. Hardware could be a commodity, but software should always be their own.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- bluedino 13y agoHardware was too expensive. By the time RAM/HD/CPU prices became low enough to store and run a UNIX OS, something else would have came along and taken it's place. You could run DOS on a $999 computer, and you could run Windows on a $1999 computer. It took a $4999 computer to run UNIX. That's basically what kept home users on such futile operating systems. That's also what kept Windows NT off peoples desktops until 2000 or so.
- roghummal 13y agoI am suspicious of this claim.
- ams6110 13y agoI disagree. I remember running Minix on a no-name 8088 machine with 640K of RAM and no hard drive at all. Unix was developed on machines with far less resources than that. It is not a particularly heavy-weight OS.
- yuhong 13y agoIn fact, MS did make Xenix for 8086 too.
- eschaton 13y agoAnd Minix was essentially a clone of IBM PC-IX, which was essentially a UNIX Version 7 for the PC and PC-XT that could also run off floppies.
- bluedino 13y agoSure, Minix would run on a low-end system, but to have taken the place of Microsoft Windows as the successor to DOS you would have needed a GUI like X which Minix did not have.
- gaius 13y agoUnix, schmunix. With a 7 Mhz processor and 256k RAM, the Amiga delivered multitasking, a GUI, interprocess communication, hardware accelerated graphics and a whole heap of other features in 1985 that the MS/Intel world didn't deliver for another 10 years. CPU, RAM etc were not the constraining factors here.
- yuhong 13y agoAt least there was nothing unethical in this one unlike the later OS/2 2.x fiasco.
- rodgerd 13y agoIt's tempting to imagine the "what might have been" had the first Win1 APIs been delivered on Xenix rather than DOS.