[TUHS] XENIX and Linux (was: What happened with XENIX? (was Re: Unix/World Magazines))

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Wednesday,  8 January 2020 at 10:12:23 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Jan 2020, reed at reedmedia.net wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> What happened with XENIX?  I know it had some success (I used at least
>> one retired system with it), but nothing near the other offerings on the
>> PC family.
>
> 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).

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.

> Wouldn't Linux have arrived at around that time?

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
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