[TUHS] Interesting post about Microsoft and UNIX

[Arno Griffioen via TUHS]

On Sat, Dec 07, 2024 at 07:34:07AM -0500, Henry Bent wrote:
> "UNIX System V and the 80386 are a perfect technological match," said Bill
> Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corporation, in remarks at AT&T's press conference
> here. AT&T and Microsoft are developing a new version of UNIX System V for the
> 80386 chip that will run XENIX System V as well as UNIX System V applications.
> 
> This is September 1987, so perhaps Microsoft's abandonment of Xenix was not as
> early as I had thought.  Though this does imply that the Xenix port was not
> ready at that point, and perhaps was ultimately abandoned by Microsoft.


https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/unix/scohistory.html states that:

"1987 - SCO ships SCO XENIX 386, the first 32-bit operating system (and first 
 UNIX System) for Intel 386 processor-based systems."

So it looks like XENIX development had been already stopped at MS and taken
on/over by SCO in the meantime.

Matches up with the WIKI doc on Xenix and the transfer of it's ownership from 
MS to SCO:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix#:~:text=SCO's%20Xenix%20System%20V%2F386,both%20Xenix%20and%20SCO%20Unix.

So it seems around 1985/6 MS stopped any real Xenix development and got out
of the UNIX market, after which SCO went on with it.

Side-note... 

Compaq servers running SCO UNIX versions were *very* popular in the small 
to medium business area here from the late 80's onward.

Lots of 'productivity' software like administrative/financial/etc. software 
on SCO that allowed many people to work concurrently using one or a few servers 
and either terminals or some sort of networking. (Ahhhhh... The days
of the network-wars with oodles of competing more and lesser known
network types.. Messy and convoluted, but quite fun... :) )

The fact that it was UNIX underneath was totally irrelevant to most end
customers though. They just got/ran it to run their business and it worked
much better than any MS-based solution until the early 2000s.

Used to be a large part of my work during the early 90's to maintain, upgrade
and fix such systems as the end customers usually had no technical people 
onsite anyway.

							Bye, Arno.