Microsoft and Xenix.

[Alan Chandler <alan@chandlerfamily.org.uk>]

I am not subscribed to the list, but I scan the archives and saw the 
following.  Please cc e-mail me in followups.

>Rob Landley (landley@webofficenow.com) wrote
...
>In late '79 early '80, they heard the rumors that IBM was pondering a PC, 
> and Paul Allen went "any real computer will run Unix", so they got a 
>license from AT&T and ported the sucker, calling it "Xenix". (MS was a 
>porting house, 

I hope the following adds a more direct perspective on this, as I was a user 
at the time.  

I was working (and still am) for a UK computer systems integrator called 
Logica.  One of our departments sold and supported Xenix (as distributor for 
Microsoft? - all the manuals had Logica on the covers although there was at 
least some mention of Microsoft inside) in the UK.  At the time it ONLY ran 
on PDP 11's and I used it to build a configuration management system (on top 
of SCCS) for the telemetry product that I was responsible for.  I acquired 
Xenix for my department in 1984

It was more like (can't remember exactly when) 1985/1986 that Xenix got 
ported to the IBM PC. I remember because we were evaluating software to use 
for our telemetry workstations (which previously had been using expensive 
special graphics hardware and we were trying to see if we could use a PC 
instead) and I was comparing Xenix, GEM (remember that - for a time it looked 
like it might be ahead of windows) and Microsoft Windows v 1 .  We chose 
Windows in the end for its graphics capability although by the time we 
started development it was up to v2 and we were using 286's (this was 
1987/88).  
...

>Xenix was unloaded on the Santa-Cruz operation almost 
>immediately,

Logica sold out its Xenix operation to Santa-Cruz around 1987 (definately 
before October 1987) because we couldn't afford the costs of developing the 
product (which makes me think that we had bought it out from Microsoft - at 
least in the UK).  By then we had switched our PDP 11s to System V (I also 
remember BUYING an editor called "emacs" for use on it:-) ).

-- 

  Alan - alan@chandlerfamily.org.uk
http://www.chandlerfamily.org.uk