[pups] Interesting PDP/Xenix History

[Michael Davidson]

Frank Wortner wrote:
>  
> The link edit scheme was fairly complicated.  You first had to build two
> executables:  a standard shared text executable,  and a standard split I&D
> executable.  Then you had to run a special program which took those two
> binaries as input and constructed the final image.  If any of your
> subroutines couldn't fit into 8K,  you were out of luck.  Fortunately,  the
> C compiler driver had a option to do this silliness automatically.

The program that did this was called "23fix" (since it "fixed" things
so that they could be run on a non split i&d 11/23) 

> Robert Tillyard asked "Would SCO->Caldera have copies of this [PDP/11
> XENIX]?"  I remember asking that same question on this very list several
> years ago.  Warren's answer was essentially "No."  If I remember correctly,
> he said that they really had no archival material at all.

Unfortunately all of the "official" SCO archives from this era went
into some offsite storage facility about 10 years ago, never to be
seen again. I expect that there are still a few copies around, but
I don't personally have one.

By the way, just to complicate things even more, SCO really didn't
do much at all with XENIX/11 since they already had their own V7
based UNIX, called "Dynix" (a name which was later sold to Sequent).
Most of the actual XENIX/11 systems that I encountered were actually
supplied by the "Software Products Group" of Logica (which was
ultimately acquired by SCO back in 1986)