Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2000 15:44:41 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: grog@lemis.com (Greg Lehey) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), cfuhrman@tfcci.com (Chris Fuhrman), chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Microsoft Source (fwd) Message-ID: <200011141544.IAA19542@usr08.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <20001111191459.H4535@sydney.worldwide.lemis.com> from "Greg Lehey" at Nov 11, 2000 07:14:59 PM
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> > Microsoft announced Xenix on 25 Aug 1980, the same year they > > signed a contract with IBM to provide compilers for the, at > > the time, unannounced IBM PC. > > XENIX came first. I'm sure the announcement was earlier; they had an > article in the August 1980 Byte. And my best guess is that the IBM > deal was done in September 1980. It was definitely done by November, > when I heard about it. See Bill Gate's "timeline for Microsoft" on his personal web site. > > Most of the original developement was done on Sun equipment, > > What equipment did Sun have in 1980? Did they even exist? I believe the equipment was SUN 1 and SUN 2 hardware. The one that Microsoft requested product on was a Sun 3 with QIC-11 tape drive, which was the commercial model. > > and Microsoft was actually running a large chunk of their language > > engineering on Xenix on Sun machines, as late as 1988 (I got a call > > from a Microsoft employee wanting to buy a copy of our > > communications software for Xenix running on Sun hardware; when I > > said "What?!?", he said "Oh, that's right, it's an internal product > > only". Originally, Xenix only ran on 68000 hardware. > > Do you have any evidence for this? Admittedly, there was 68000 > hardware at the time, but it was very early, and there's no obvious > reason why Microsoft (which was definitely in charge of XENIX) would > have bothered to port to an architecture they didn't plan to use, > especially since it was big-endian and 32 bit, whereas both the PDP-11 > and i86 were little-endian and 16 bit. I'd suspect that you're > extrapolating here. Also on Bill Gates personal web site, and in the "History" section of the SCO web site. As a friend of mine is fond of saying "It's all out there, you just have to know how to find it". 8-). Actually, I was offered a job in the compiler group at Microsoft in the late 80's; I probably should have taken it, I'd be, uh, "more retired" now... Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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