Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 19:14:59 +0800 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: Chris Fuhrman <cfuhrman@tfcci.com>, chat@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Microsoft Source (fwd) Message-ID: <20001111191459.H4535@sydney.worldwide.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <200011062350.QAA25774@usr08.primenet.com>; from tlambert@primenet.com on Mon, Nov 06, 2000 at 11:50:54PM %2B0000 References: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0011060742520.6678-100000@icestorm.tfcc.com> <200011062350.QAA25774@usr08.primenet.com>
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On Monday, 6 November 2000 at 23:50:54 +0000, Terry Lambert wrote: >>> They did once already. It was called XENIX. >>> If they still have it, they could dust it off, slap in a linux kernel and >>> call it MS linux. >>> >> >> This got me doing some research on the subject of XENIX. Microsoft >> purchased a stake in SCO sometime in the early 80's which lead to the >> development and release of XENIX. In '87, Microsoft was concerned that >> AT&T's UNIX wouldn't be able to run XENIX app's so they entered into a >> licensing agreement with AT&T to include some XENIX code in the AT&T >> base. AT&T sold it's UNIX technology to Novell in '93 who then sold it to >> SCO in '95. Recently, Microsoft sold it's shares in SCO after which SCO's >> shares collapsed. >> >> Some interesting tidbits: SCO asked M$ to drop the agreement since the >> XENIX code wasn't relavant. M$ refused and as a consequence, SCO paid M$ >> about $1.138 million in royalties (ouch) in FY 1998. >> >> Confusing, no? ;) > > I've been in the bowels of that code. > > 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. > Most of the original developement was done on Sun equipment, What equipment did Sun have in 1980? Did they even exist? > 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. Greg -- Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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