On Tue, 7 Jan 2020, reed(a)reedmedia.net wrote: [...] I was forced to use Xenix for a contracting job (and hated it, as it was almost-but-not-quite-Unix, and the differences annoyed me). Wouldn't Linux have arrived at around that time? -- Dave

Hell, Linux didn't exist at all till '91. I think Xenix was more just a casualty of the Unix Wars. The victors there were SunOS/Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX. There were a bunch more walking wounded that never really achieved much market share. By the time SCO filed suit in 2003, not only were the Unix Wars fairly long over (SCO had lost), but commercial Unixes had largely been supplanted by Linux (and BSD enthusiasts had three free options, and OS X was a thing if you wanted a commercial BSD, but Apple never managed to make much in the way of inroads into the server market). Linux's ascendency happened around the turn of the millennium, as I recall, although I was using AIX at my job as late as 2010-2011, and I presume the Big Several still exist in some form or other. On Tue, Jan 7, 2020 at 4:28 PM Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:

On Wed, 8 Jan 2020 at 07:48, Thomas Paulsen <thomas.paulsen(a)firemail.de> wrote: I do remember supporting a small Xenix userbase in the mid-90's in southeast Ireland. Mostly in law offices, surprisingly. They were very resilient, usually running on a Wang PC-02 with greenscreen terminals (Wyse, I think). Although they worked fine for their intended purpose (word processing etc.), the allure of Windows was their demise.

This brings back memories. My first exposure to Unix (ca. 1985) was Interactive 386/ix. I think I still have the floppies for it around here somewhere. I don't know if they're still readable but if anyone wants them, send me a private email.

On Wednesday, 8 January 2020 at 10:12:23 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote: I did so too in the early 1990s, using (IIRC) "XENIX System V", an attempt to retrofit some System V features to XENIX. It was very limited: it ran in Intel 80386 real mode, so it was limited to 16 MB of memory. The toolchain was excruciating. I think it was based on Microsoft products, and I soon replaced them with GNU software, which had its problems on the platform. The good news: it worked. You don't say your time. Referring to Jeremy's original message (time frame mid-1980s), no, Linus would have been about 14 at the time. He made the first announcement of what would become Linux on 25 August 1991 (“just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu"). So yes, it was available when I was doing my XENIX work. So was BSD/386, which is what I was using at the time. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA

Den 08.01.2020 23:15, skrev Dave Horsfall: In my experience, macOS breaks more things these days. -- Hilsen Harald

Yes, I worked at INTERACTIVE Systems Corp. (ISC) from 1978 to the end of 1991 when Sun Microsystems acquired ISC. -- Heinz -- On 1/8/2020 4:01 PM, ron(a)ronnatalie.com wrote:

When I first used “Unix” in the late 80’s, most of the available source code needed some sort of tweaking to work, unless the author happened to have the same system I was using (HP/UX, Minix, and a BSD VAX, iirc). A rummage through the GNU’s autoconf docs will (re)acquaint you with he multitude of small differences that needed to be accounted for to make most things portable. Then Sun became the dominant vendor, and most things would work out of the box on SunOS / Solaris, with different degrees of effort required depending on how different your system was. I was working for a DEC-sponsored lab at the time, and Ultrix was more in the BSD camp than Solaris, but there was usually someone had done some BSD-style tweaks that could be co-opted into mostly working for Ultrix. Then we got the fancy new DEC3000 Alphas, and to a first approximation, *nothing* worked (although that was mostly 64 bit pointers, rather than OSF/1). As Linux has become increasingly popular, things now almost universally work out of the box on Linux, with some work required to make macOS, *BSD, and the other commercial Unices work. Often now, there’s no autoconf (at least for newer projects) or it’s poorly maintained, and I find myself back to the 80s-style patching to get stuff to run on systems other than Linux. Whenever one system becomes too popular, the definition of “Unix” drifts in that direction … d

XENIX was staged for greatness until Microsoft decided they did not want to be subject to the AT&T license long term with all the potential issues that could arise by not being in complete control of their operating system.

On Wed, 8 Jan 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: It was from the magazine. I added the brackets for the date which came from an earlier sentence in the article.

On Wednesday, 8 January 2020 at 12:18:01 +0000, Michael Kjörling wrote: Right, but my recollection is that the original quote was "mid 1980s" (i.e. round 1985), not "mid 1980". Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA