[pups] Interesting PDP/Xenix History

From a thread on Slashdot about Microsoft's Ancient History w/Unix http://slashdot.org/articles/02/03/23/1422243.shtml?tid=130 First Unix/Xenix (Score:1) by presearch on Saturday March 23, @01:58PM (#3213453) (User #214913 Info) In 1979 all that existed of Xenix was a silver brochure from Microsoft but there was no distribution. I wanted it to run it/sell it, seeing that you could do the timesharing thing just like back at college, except without a giant machine behind glass. I contacted the then tiny Microsoft, asked, begged, pleaded but they had nothing to sell. After multiple inquiries, they finally told me that they didn't have Xenix yet, but they expected it to arrive shortly. Arrive? From where? I was told, from Human Computing Resources (HCR) in Toronto. Ahh, interesting. So I called HCR somehow got them to commit to an early delivery. After a few weeks, and several dollars, the day came. MS wanted a PDP-11 and 68000 version and was only after the PDP-11 distro, I was 1 week ahead in the queue from Microsoft. So, as I was told from HCR, I had the first Xenix distribution in the US, ahead of Microsoft. I ran it on a LSI-11/23 with insanely expensive 256Kb of memory and a giant 20Mb drive from Charles River Data Systems. It also had 2 eight inch floppies (errrtt, clunk, clunk, errrrttt), and 2 four port serial cards that each ran a VT100. The distro came on a 9-track tape (which I still have) and the take drive was this weird, front loading thing where you loaded the tape in the front like a big floppy and it auto threaded the tape (sometimes). As I remember, it seemed pretty fast, I'd start up stuff on all of the terminals, just to do it. Of course, it wasn't that fast but at the time.... The Unix itself was a more or less pure Unix v7. The only thing, as I remember that made is Xenix, was the boot message and the captions on the man pages. There was no vi at that time, the editor of choice was "ed". It did have a nice /usr/games and I got a Zork for it from a friend. We ended up selling a few of the boxes. The company was called MSD. The only record of such is in a 1981 (Jan?) issue of Byte with our little ad in the back. And that's the story of the first commercial Unix sold in the US.