[TUHS] XENIX or UNIX? (was: Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!)

[George Michaelson]

System V and Xenix both came out of System III and it had X25
networks, JANET. Albeit indirectly, via something like an RT-11
frontend. System III had real limittions on the compiler. It was a
nightmare using code which came from systems which had larger address
space, a larger "heap" for CPP #defines (ok heap maybe isn't the word,
but you know what I mean) -even down to split I/D stuff, it was just
nasty.

I think Xenix was a bit of a half-way bet. They didn't invest. No
reason it couldn't have become something bigger, HP-UX did. Shame, I
think that should have died at birth.

On Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 11:16 AM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
>
> On Wednesday, 17 March 2021 at 21:33:37 +0100, Josh Good wrote:
> > Hello UNIX veterans.
> >
> > So I stumbled online upon a copy of the book "SCO Xenix System V Operating
> > System User's Guide", from 1988, advertised as having 395 pages, and the
> > asked for price was 2.50 EUROs. I bought it, expecting --well, I don't know
> > exactly what I was expecting, something quaint and interesting, I suppose.
> >
> > I've received the book, and it is not a treasure trobe, to say the least. I
> > am in fact surprised at how sparse was UNIX System V of this age, almost
> > spartan.
>
> I'm surprised that nobody else mentioned this, but XENIX System V and
> UNIX System V were two very different beasts.  I've used both, and
> XENIX is considerably worse.
>
> > And that's it. The communications part only deals the Micnet (a
> > serial-port based local networking scheme), and UUCP. No mention at
> > all of the words "Internet" or "TCP/IP", no even in the Index.
>
> It was available, and I had it installed.  In fact, somewhere I still
> have the media, though it's unlikely that they're still readable.  But
> like Interactive UNIX System V/386 (if I have the names, it was
> commercially oriented and sold each individual component separately,
> separate media, separate documentation, and these bloody license keys.
>
> > I'm probably spoiled from Linux having repositories full of packaged
> > free software, where the user just has to worry about "which is the
> > best of": email program, text editor, browser, image manipulation
> > program, video player, etc. I understand this now pretty well, how
> > spoiled are we these days.
>
> Yes, I had BSD/386 at the same time I actually had to use XENIX, and
> the difference was like night and day.  I moved as much of my
> development environment to BSD as possible, not helped by XENIX's lack
> of NFS.  I'm not sure it even had X.
>
> Greg
> --
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