Microsoft's forgotten UNIX operating system - Whatever happened to Xenix?
Did you know that Microsoft made their own version of UNIX, all the way back as far as 1979, before MS-DOS and Windows was even a thing!? As usual, no story of computing folklore would be complete without a bit of controversy, and the story of Xenix is not short of a fair few crazy moments! Controversy aside, I bet you'll learn a good bit about a bit of history today, that could have changed the way we see and use computers a whole lot, if Xenix had won the day. Get ready for a compelling story!
Learn about: Legal battles! Product mergers! Acquisitions! UNIX on the original PC and Apple Lisa! Steve Ballmer on Cocaine!
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#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #infosec
Credits for video:
A look into Xenix, Microsoft's long forgotten Unix Operating System [COMPAQ PORTABLE PLUS - Pt III] - @THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR
• A look into Xenix, Mic...
SCO OpenServer 6.0.0 - @digitalarchaeologist5102
• SCO OpenServer 6.0.0 (...
SCO vs. IBM - SCO's lawsuit against IBM - @techperspectives
• SCO vs. IBM - SCO's la...
Lawyer Career Video - @Lawyer Career Video
• Lawyer Career Video
BSD UNIX - NETWORK ENCYCLOPEDIA @NetworkEncyclopedia
• BSD UNIX - NETWORK ENC...
SUN Sparcstation 10 (Year 1993) - SUN OS 4.1.4 & NeXTSTEP 3.3.4 - @devnull.
• SUN Sparcstation 10 (Y...
A Tour of Windows 3.1 - Software Showcase - @ComputerClan
• A Tour of Windows 3.1 ...
How Bill Gates CRUSHED IBM with One GENIUS Move (The Story of Microsoft Documentary) - @thinkonomics
• How Bill Gates CRUSHED...
Linus Torvalds Introduces Linux 1.0 - @techperspectives
• Linus Torvalds Introdu...
Microsoft Windows 95 - Start Multitasking (Commercial Remake) - @holograms
• Microsoft Windows 95 -...
History of Microsoft -- 1975 - @jonpaulmoen
• History of Microsoft -...
TRS-80 Model 16 - TRSDOS and XENIX Demo - @TJBChris
• TRS-80 Model 16 - TRSD...
Compaq 386s/20 386sx - XENIX with GUI & Network (Year 1991) - @devnull.
• Compaq 386s/20 386sx -...
The Computer Chronicles - UNIX (1985) - @ComputerChroniclesYT
• The Computer Chronicle...
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie Explain UNIX (Bell Labs) - @VortexTech
• Ken Thompson and Denni...
Bell Labs Film on Shaping the Computer Age from 1984 - AT&T Archives - @ATTTechChannel
• Bell Labs Film on Shap...
AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System - @ATTTechChannel
• AT&T Archives: The UNI...
Microsoft Interface Manager:
virtuallyfun.com/2010/07/19/m...
XENIX Now! / SCO XENIX - Computer Ads From the Past:
computeradsfromthepast.substa...
Beta Archive SCO Unix 3.2:
www.betaarchive.com/forum/vie...
SCO System V 2.x - Archive.org:
archive.org/details/bitsavers...
Apple Lisa and SCO XENIX:
blog.boreas.ro/2007/12/xenix-b...
virtuallyfun.com/2009/02/10/a...
Table of Contents:
0:00 Introduction
1:44 Origins of Xenix
6:15 What did Xenix run on & what did it do?
8:08 How much did Xenix cost?
9:57 Shortcomings of Xenix
12:19 Imagine what could have been
15:07 Selling to SCO
20:04 Legal Issues & Bankruptcy
21:05 How Xenix lives on!
ok, guys, i was the architect and member of a small team that developed the first ever 8086 based all in one desktop Xenix system (including a monitor sitting on top of a fairly small box). It was successfully demonstrated in the 1980 NCC (National Computer Conference) in Anaheim. It was such a stunner that quite a few people thought the machine must be connected to a hidden PDP in the back. Here are the points: 1) during the time of 1979 or there about, there were a convergency of new technologies, 16-bit processor, 5 1/4 inch hard drive and low(er) cost CRT display. We have decided that something was begging to be done to integrate these together, and we were certainly not the only one. Those were the hardware, but how does one get the software?? Bill Gates, being very smart, decided on Xenix. The motivation was to buy thousands of licenses from AT&T and spread the cost. If one were to buy Unix license from AT&T, it would be totally not viable, as each license will cost a fortune. AT&T had a sliding scale for Unix, but the cost would not sufficiently come down until the number are in the 10s of thousands. Bill has the vision of "fronting" the money such that the licenses can be cheap enough. We signed that contract (committed to sell x thousands of copies of Xenix) with then Xenix product manager Mark Ursino at Microsoft's ONB Plaza office in Bellevue and shake hand with Bill. He still looked like a teenager and up all-night writing code at the time. Those were the days.
Neat! It's not much but I have the neat little lever arch style Xenix manual.
I subscribed. The tech was before my time as I was born in 1988 but I have to be one of the best. Maybe to over compensate no idea. But I will be one of the best and the best way to do that is to follow those who did it. Thank you for your contribution.
I got into that game relatively late. We evaluated Xenix versus then brand new Interactive Systems Corporation UNIX SysV 3.2, and decided on the latter. It served us very well for several years before Kodak sold them to Sun who very soon killed the product, and we switched to, again brand new, Linux.
@@bazoo513 ISC or Interactive Systems Corp Unix!! Talking about history!! I was at a company that was ISC's biggest customer in the late 70s. I was down in their Santa Monica Headquarter a number of times. This is totally politically incorrect now, but they had the most beautiful(and stylish) tech staff I have ever met before or since.
My understanding was that it (Xenix) couldn't multi-task. Pick systems develpped by McDonnald Douglas could have 4 people working simultaneously on a 8088 equipped with 4 RS-232 ports.
My dad's office ran XENIX on a 286 until the early 90s. Like you said, it was perfect for small businesses that wanted to computerize - sure, the OS was much more expensive than MS-DOS, but instead of needing a PC on every desk, you could manage with one PC and a bunch of terminals. I remember being about 6 years old when for whatever reason he had to go into the office on the weekend while my mom was away. He took me with him, plunked me down in front of a terminal, and showed me where the games were and how to run them. It was a just a collection of some of what we know as the "bsdgames" package today, but I had a blast!
Awesome story! I'm surprised you can remember that from such a tender age! I remember finding those games when rooting around my first college's Unix server, which I believe was SCO, I ended up using John the ripper on /etc/passwd (no shadow in those days), got my tutors password! Good times!
Same here, but it wasn't a small office, it was the us army Corp of engineers. As a kid, I would go to work with my father on Saturdays and play rogue on the altos machines. I still have a altos 586 upgraded to a 986. I doubt the government would let a kid come in and play on their computers these days.
Hunt the wumpus
@@robertanderson5092 I remember as a kid typing in a "Wumpus Hunter" game program from a book of scary games in Basic !, on wait for it....... a Sega SC3000 , & then saving it too Compact Cassette, oh what fun I had way back then, those were the days :) .
In the eighties I worked for a towing company with a municipal impound contract for part of the city. As a computer hobbyist the owner bought a TRS-80 4P for me to try setting up a lien processing system for vehicles that were not claimed, I got it to a point where it did save a lot of time. She later hired a graveyard driver, the contract required an on duty driver at all times though there wasn't much to do after midnight, who was taking programming classes at a community collage and had worked for a medical billing software company that used SCO Xenix. He had a much better idea of how much a computer system could do for us than I did. He wrote a custom C program using, um I think it was either called C-Tree or B-Tree, code package that handled file locking and index updating, that automated the notification to the city of each impound, a serial printer there connected by a pair of modems and a ring down line (originally done by Electrowriter which sent pen movements by phone line) , the maintenance of the two log sheets, one by the city regarding the impounds, the other for the state with the lien steps taken, sent out notices required for lien processing using his own mailmerge routines, and provided the ability to look up information needed when customers called and do the point of sale bit. It used the same code to run under both MS Dos and Xenix with the only changes being that the Xenix code used printw instead of printf and the syntax needed to send a file to the printer(all easy to handle with make file switches). Our first system was on an 80286 with the monitor, two additional Wyse 60 terminals, two Okidata Micoline printers with serial and adjustable width tractor feeds, a 182 80 column and 192 wide column, an IBM Pro printer which could do both tractor feed and multi-part invoices, plus the 182 at the city, and a support modem so one of us could fix things from home. We had inhouse email, could export information by sneaker net to the accounting computer, and set up the drivers to do their end of shift tally. Not the fastest system in the world, but an incredible step up from doing it all by hand aided by carbon paper. It wasn't until we upgraded to a 386, adding several more terminals, that we realized how slow that first system was.
'sneaker net' - now I know this is a genuine story! Fantastic. I just about remember Xenix from when my old man (RIP) bought the family a brand new 386 i wthh both 5.25in and a 3in floppy, 1Mb Ram and a 40Mb HDD (IDE, no MFM or RLL stuf!)
how big was that towing company?? sounds like there was more office work than driving work.
@@danwake4431 It's a towing company for people who don't want their cars to be towed, of course there is a lot of paperwork. What I loved about the 286 is that it was right at the sweet spot for optimization -- good code can be quite responsive and lazy code is slow.
While I had used other computers before, Xenix was the first OS that I ever supported. First day I turned up to work with a team, only to find out they had only one other guy and he quit when he found out they had employed me. I was handed the manuals and told do what you can! not one person in the company knew anything about how any of it worked. Fortunately nothing was problematic so I had time to learn it. Edit for spelling mistake.
I never liked Zenix but I love Zinex
@@GodEmperorSuperStar UGH! I must now do 100 lines I must not drink and drive KZhead....
Before getting into "vintage computing" I hadn't fully realized how much of the future of a US-based company depends on succesfully filing and winning lawsuits. It's quite a depressing business model, but yeah...
My bowling center still has an old install of Brunswick AS90 which has a back office system called Command Network. It runs on Xenix System V and it’s reliable as could be to this day.
In the 1990s I had a side job maintaining Xenix and newer SCO OpenServer systems. They were so reliable I didn't have much work aside from repairs from lightning strikes, installing peripherals including RS-232 terminals, and upgrading old hardware. The Xenix operating system and its software just worked.
That SCO Group lawsuit was nuts. Other than trying to one on one with IBM. They also sued Linux run businesses, and tried to sell protection services from getting involved in the lawsuit. As much of a fan of Unix, I am happy to see that company gone.
Microsoft is worse, they just dodged karma. All these corporations are just legalized organized crime.
The money and tacit encouragement behind SCO's antics was none other than Mr. Ballmer.
Not the same SCO.
The way to make money really was to say the op system is free but charge for the support, training, installation and so on
@@highpath4776 this works just as long as you don't put much effort into making the OS Intuitive to use.
@1:19 - "UNIX could have been on everyone's desktop instead of... MacOS." but MacOS is UNIX. "macOS is a UNIX 03-compliant operating system certified by The Open Group. It has been since 2007, starting with MAC OS X 10.5. The only exception was Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, but compliance was regained with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion."
I guess he's talking about classic MacOS - not MacOSX.
@@surject Oh, that's probably true. Since the current version of the OS for Mac is branded as "macOS" not "MacOSX" you can see my confusion.
Found a book teaching Xenix at home when I was young (recall it was 1994). However, I skipped it and headed to learn MS-DOS instead. Then Windows 3.x, 9x, me, and finally NT based versions. Only till in my college times in early 2000s I started Unix/Linux from FreeBSD and Redhat (v4 maybe)... What a time...
From 1984 (DEC Rainbow) to 1997 (IBM something) our pharmacy ran on Xenix systems. Mainly x86, but with a detour into PDP11/?? for about 3 years. Went from 1 terminal to about 6 or 7 DEC 220? class terminals as the prescription volume increased. our software vendor moved to a windows NT based solution in the mid to late 90's and we switched once it was stable-ish! The software we used was a very basic pharmacy management system basically a database system with add ons for communication via modem for real time adjudication and payment and the most basic of drug/drug interaction checking. After I went to college where we used VAX/VMS I didn't realize how overkill the PDP was for our situation! Mainly just used for its multi terminal ability.
It was 1984. The regional office sent a tech with some hard drives. He installed them. One of them was dead. He installed Xenix and gave me the root password. No manuals. What's a guy to do? I tried out every command in a MS-DOS manual and the one that worked, that did _something_, was "echo *". Eventually, months later, I got a book that had some bits about Xenix in it, and learned to use the vi editor. No compiler, so I learned the shell programming language and the AWK programming language instead. You can do a lot with AWK if you try. Managed to figure out how to transfer files across a serial cable (had to figure out HOW to solder up a serial cable first) using 'cu' and 'uucp'. Somehow managed to parlay that into a job at the regional office and spent the rest of the 80's travelling to Latin America doing field support. Figured out the C programming language and slid sideways into being a maintenance programmer. One day the phone rings and the voice asks, "Would you like to be the IT manager in Caracas?". After some hesitation, I end up in Caracas, running their IT. Xenix, Xenix and more Xenix. But eventually, the company migrated to NCR UNIX and then HP-UX. But yeah, Xenix was what I cut my teeth on.
Great story!
So you saw a lot of Alpakas in Latin amer.^^
I installed and supported many Xenix systems. At the time the Tandy 6000 was a great machine for running it. Would love to get my hands on a T6000 again.
I setup a bunch of grain elevators in the midwest in the early 80's on the Model 16 running Xenix taking care of the scales, moisture analysis and accounting software. A Model 16 in the back with dumb terminals connected all over along with serial devices for data transfer was a lot of fun back in the day.
Wow that sounds pretty powerful for the time!
In 1986-1988, my college had a Tandy 6000 HD running Microsoft Xenix with a bunch of terminals attached. I don't know how long they kept that system up after I left.
Xenix was very popular in small vertcal applcations such as legal or dental office packages. It never had any home user penetration, as it was technically challenging to run and quite expensive for hobbyist users. On the higher end, banks and other users preferred more powerful RISC workstations from Sun, HP or IBM. It wasn't really until more powerful PCs and cheaper Linux based OS's that PC-based Unix really became popular and displaced the propriatary workstations.
Wait, isn’t Unix on every desktop? There’s a lots of Android phones out there… Linux. And iPhones too… FreeBSD. Macs take a chunk of the desktop marketshare… also FreeBSD, 95% the same OS as iOS. And for the solemn many using Windows… most of what they do is mostly web-based, which is mostly Linux servers. It amazes be how people continue to think Microsoft Windows is a dominant powerhouse when literally everything else, powering just about everything but a majority of old-fashioned desktop PCs, is running on a POSIX-compliant Linux- or BSD-derived OS. Windows is the minority and has been for a long time.
@@slippydouglas If you're just looking at servers, than Linux and Unix are dominant, although Windows Server has a surprisingly large share. In phones, it totally rules. But in traditional desktop PCs , Linux and Mac combined still only have a tiny share. And Wimdows really still rules. After 2025, when only Win11 will jbe supported, this may change as a lot of powerful and expensive PCs can't run it and most don't want to.
So funny you mentioned dental offices. Most of my side job in the 1990s was to service dental and medical offices and a TV station. They all used RS-232 terminals hosted on legacy Microsoft Xenix and newer SCO Xenix and the even newer Unixware/OpenServer derivatives. The RS-232 concentrators were amazing devices that let one Xenix server host a dozen or two terminals. Believe it or not, running serial terminals was thousands of dollars cheaper than running dedicated PCs at all those dozen or two desks that everyone runs today.
@@kjrehbergOddly enough, it seems like the dental practice management systems have the least problems. My PCP’s practice management system is dog piss jones slow and buggy as was his prior one. As I get older I see more specialists and a lot of the third party systems just suck. Mind you, these are relatively new desktops. Very little investment in software or they’re client based and the network just isn’t configured properly.
@geoffk777 It will absolutely change. Even just considering models of Mac becoming obsolete, people install Linux to them (not often, but I do still have a machine that I'm putting Linux on for my friend's mom, so some do). After the Win10 purge, you're going to see a lot more Linux.
Minor point: Microsoft didn’t initially write DOS per se. They bought it from SCP and relabeled SCP’s 86-DOS as MS-DOS.
True enough both Xenix and DOS started at MS in 1980. DOS was bought from Seattle Computer Products (Chuck Peterson).
And that DOS was largely a port of CP/M, as the API was the same, and the filesystem was the same.
I worked for a banking software company in the mid-90s which still used Xenix on some of their systems. For whatever reason the company leadership had no desire to move over to Linux, even though it was already pretty mature by that time; instead we were just rewriting everything for Windows '98 instead.
Many boomers business owners still have this internal belief that free software is bad software. Linus torvald explained this concept in an interview if I can still remember. Stating he had sort of a falling out with richard stallman because of it, as Richard wanted to label GNU+Linux as “Free software” whilst Linus wanted to label it as “Opensource software” to not scare businesses away. People in this world are very shortsighted, definitely those at the top.
Are you sure about Win98? Banks i know of mostly used OS/2 and later Windows NT based systems in the 90s to move over to Windows NT based systems like W2k, WinXP, Win Vista, Win 7 and so on later.
@@arsalananwari4377it was and still is mostly about support. Especially in those days it was almost impossible to buy in professional support for linux. You were limited to long haired boys with droopy eyes and dirty jeans smoking pot in their mothers' basements more often than not. Not exactly the kind of support staff a large bank (or any sane company for that matter) wants to hire. All that changed when Red Hat corporation started their linux enterprise. And changed the linux landscape forever from a basement hacker thing you got delivered on home burnt CDs or floppies to a suits and ties enterprise product delivered in shiny boxes with pristinely printed disks. I remember those days well, and that's exactly the reason why companies didn't go with Linux, instead going with HP, IBM, Sun, etc. instead.
Geez, why not at least use Windows NT with a much more stable kernal and same GUI than running on top of cruddy DOS? Executives in the 90's were all FUD-filled... :P
I worked with another obscure Xenix system V variant, called Sinix (Siemens Unix). Later renamed to Reliant unix.
As reliable as the Reliant motorcar ?
Imagine a multitasking pre emptive operating system with network capability, powerful cpu and a gui in the 80's. Amiga: hold my beer
Imagine people realizing Microshit's history of buying and killing of superior competitive software.
Amiga wasn't preemptive multitasking, it was only cooperative multitasking. And the CPU had no MMU, while the 386 did have a MMU. The GUI of the Amiga was only a GUI, nothing more, the GUI of Windows was GDI an abstraction to the Hardware like Postscript. It means that the graphic looks the same everywhere, no matter what output device you output it to. This can be a monitor, a printer, a plotter or anything else. The Amiga's GUI was pixel based and didn't have anything like that, you could only display it on the monitor, not on the printer or plotter.
@@OpenGL4ever Digital's GEM GDOS worked the same way (providing an abstract interface to arbitrary hardware). In part due to the Apple lawsuit it never saw widespread use on the PC (it's best known for use on the Atari ST/TT/Falcon).
@@OpenGL4ever Spent a lot of time inside Exec. it was most definitely preemptive multitasking. You've been rather like a bad case of herpes responding to Amiga posts, talking right out of your arse.
@@OpenGL4ever Amiga was absolutely preemptive multitasking. The CPU had an MMU companion chip in higher-end Amiga models. You are either misinformed or uninformed. I owned both types of Amigas, including one that ran UNIX which absolutely required an MMU. As for the PostScript interface (as you say), you are obviously confusing Windows with the NeXT and earlier Sony NEWS workstations which used Display PostScript. None of those had anything to do with Microsoft Windows and GDI can't be compared with Display PostScript.
I just discovered your channel. Great content. I was the lead controls engineer for a small refinery that my team upgraded from pneumatic controls to a modern control system, the Foxboro I/A. We did development work on Xenix systems prior to porting everything to Sun Sparc stations - this was later 95 into 96. Solaris was so much nicer than Xenix but both operating systems were solid and never seemed to be plaqued by the issues NT 4.0 had.
Xenix was basically never sold to end users to 'run something' - it was most frequently put together as a solution package by a provider who was most frequently the developer of the software that ran on top. For example; a multi-user accounting tool, or database product. A real-estate company client of ours ran for YEARS on Tandy Model 16s in branch offices, with simple terminals for users.
I worked for a company that switched to SCO Unix running on PCs, previously they used NCR towers and before that ME29 mainframes. I still find *ix operating systems annoying.
Awesome deep dive into this. Loved the video!
And props to the GNU project for creating libre alternatives to almost every Unix application. That's really what would make Linux possible.
kids use gnu chads use bsd
@@CJ123chads? Yeah right...
I saw this OS still in active use as late as 2013 at a metal working company on their plasma cutter system. They told me why screw with what works when the system initially cost them like $20,000... Granted it took some work to keep the old controller computers running, but hey, can't say I blame them at that price.
Don't break what ain't broken! I guess there's not a lot of exploits around for Xenix!
@@AlsGeekLab Their plasma cutter system was also encryption key locked by a proprietary adapter unique to the cutter hardware. Not like they even had a choice of upgrading OS if they even wanted to..
@@southernflatland You'd be surprised at all the keys that have been broken over the years.
@@GodEmperorSuperStar Nah not really, but you'd be surprised how few systems even have parallel ports these days, and the ones that do almost certainly don't allow kernel level access to the port. It's not like that plasma cutter system is in any way compatible with a PostScript printer. Not only would they have to break past the encryption lock, they'd also have to *completely* reverse engineer the data protocol and control signals, write modern drivers from the ground up, and also write a fresh new CAD user interface to go along with their proprietary file format. It's not like this thing was compatible with AutoCAD either, their cutout template files were stored on floppy disk. Not saying it's impossible, but by the time you pay a small team of techs and programmers to accomplish all that, you may as well have already invested the money into a new cutter system.
I recall using Minix for warehouses in 98-99, what a time to be alive!
The first POSIX OS I ever used was Xenix. Then, SCO System V, and Irix.
We have in our midst, a UNIX veteran!
Man what a twisted tale . I remember a buddy of mine installing Xenix in dentists offices in the 80s. I was also installing Novell Netware at the same time in Travel agents and accounting offices. It was a whole different era then for sure. Thanks for the clarification on who developed what and whom owned it.
you thought cpm was the future you thought wrong it's windows🤣🤣🤣
15:41 Zilog System 8000 -- I think that was based on AT&T System III Unix. I briefly had a play with one. The “Zilog Mac connection” is presumably referring to the Z8530 serial controller chips that the Apple Macs had back then. These were incredibly versatile, and could be programmed not only to do RS232/422/423 at high bit rates, but also handle the LocalTalk networking protocol at 230.4kbps. Oh, and who can forget the MacRecorder sound input device, which also connected by specially programming the serial ports?
The window system shown starting at 11:15 is actually mgr, not X11. It was developed in house a Bell Labs and was very small compared to X11. I fooled around with it once, long ago, and I recognize the startup screen.
Interesting. It looked /like/ x11 so I just presumed it was an earlier Bell version for Xenix, since it was running on a Xenix machine. Did mgr come out before x11?
@@AlsGeekLab It looks like MGR is from 1984. The X Windows project began about the same time, but X11 wasn't released until 1987. There were quite a few windows systems being developed around that time, most of which are now forgotten.
@@nasabear X Window System (not "Windows System") was initially released in 1984, almost 39 years ago. Twm, the now-default window manager of X, was released in 1987 by Tom LaStrange.
In the 80s and 90 I used many of the 'ix systems, Xenix, Ultrix, Irix, Minix and Linux. The Xenix was on a Z800 ? or Z8000 based machine, a 19" 6U sized box. This would be around 1984 since a PC I was lent still had a Baby Blue Z80 card and a 5 Mb hard disk.
why did they abandon UNIX😭
Actually, the system which could have become universal was SunOS (a BSD Unix) on the Sun 386i workstation, appearing in 1988. It was vastly better than Xenix, with Sun's superb graphics (soon supplanted by X Window i.e. X-11). It could run multiple MS-DOS windows in addition to the full Unix system and SunOS graphics, and it was a hit among stockbrokers and the like, who desperately needed a multi-tasking networked system to replace the multiple PC's and monitors on their desks. It also had a graphical system administration system, especially for networked and disk-sharing computers. It was still rough around the edges, but rapidly improving. Sadly, just as the 486 came on the scene, Sun dropped it a year later. I and my colleagues had three of them, running until the mid-late 1990's. Had Sun adapted their software and graphics hardware to the ISA Intel architecture (486 and later Pentium), they would have beaten Windows 3.1 and 5 by years, and beaten IBM's OS/2 and the PS/2 architecture too. Instead, they concentrated on the technical workstation market and their RISC hardware, on which the profit margins no doubt were higher but the market ultimately much smaller. Solaris was the full System V successor to the BSD-based SunOS, and Sun also went into servers. They also went back to offering Intel CPU's but by then their market was much smaller and prices uncompetitive with the commodity market PC architecture (opened up by Compaq with their Despro 386 back in 1986). Only with NT and its derivatives XT, Windows 2000, Win 7 etc. did Microsoft make the full power of the x86 architecture available to the user, but by then (early 2000's) Linux had developed as the go-to power OS, and we all know how the mid-90's joke of "World Domination" had become reality within twenty years.
MS would have leveraged their market power to crush it.
It is very rare for companies born in low-volume, high-margin markets to transition successfully to the much more cutthroat high-volume, low-margin markets.
@@eriksiers That would be much more difficult tho, DOS wouldn't have been able to compete against SunOS in that case because it was vastly inferior, they would have to push the accelerator with WIndows NT and still there would be no guarantee that they would win if SunOS had been many years ahead. Windows NT took many years to replace MS-DOS-based systems due to the lack of driver support and consumer software.
Well presented. I’ve subscribed. Best of luck on your quest to 100K subscribers.
My first exposure to UNIX was SCO XENIX on a Compaq 286. I have one client still running SCO OpenServer 5 on VMware.
what is that OpenServer instance used for?
@@eugrus primarily to run a text-based point of sale system written in RM/COBOL
Fascinating video! The history of computers in the late 70s and early 80s is so interesting and it really lays the foundation for everything that effects our day to day use of computers. Do you think you'll ever do a video on Sun's Solaris? My father use to sell for Sun Microsystems and even managed several of their branches. Would love to have learned more about the type of work he and the company were involved in.
Yes I've been looking to do a video on Solaris for a while. I'll get round to it soon
My first encounter with a PC was in elementary school in the sixth grade in the computer science classroom. Could it have been 1996? In the classroom there were 286 with MS Dos and one 486 with Windows 95. I remember the T602 program. Nowadays, I would dare to compare ms dos to the program Totall Commander in terms of its appearance. A year later, modern new PCs with Celeron 333 and Windows 95 arrived. What I will never forget is the terrible ear-splitting sound of the Epson dot matrix printer. In today's modern times, it's nice that a lot of games from that time like Prehistoric 2 and many other games from the ZX Spectrum can be played directly in the browser thanks to javascript emulators.
15:03 He could, and I think did, run MINIX on it, which had the multiuser, multitasking and memory-protected capability you have been talking about. Where it fell down was in the licensing restrictions. Remember, he was doing a course on operating systems, and he wanted to be able to experiment with OS development on his own machine and collaborate with other like-minded people, free of licensing restrictions. So Xenix would not have helped.
He used and studied Minix in university; from my understanding, his primary drive was to take advantage of the newer 32-bit processors like the 386, which Minix didn't. Licensing was an issue, but not his primary concern. It was out of necessity that he adopted the GNU userspace, which was relatively mature compared to their kernel. Consequently, Linux adopted the same license.
Correct. He actually used Minix as his OS while writing the Linux kernel, and the Minix file system was the very first Linux file system as a result. That's
Minix didn't actually have memory protection, at least not at the time, since it was written to be compatible with the 8086 which didn't have an MMU. The microkernel nature of Minix was more as a demonstration of how one could structure an OS and its API, rather than having any real clear separation and isolation of the processes. I remember writing some device drivers for Minix as part of my OS classes and being surprised at how the IPC worked - it took full advantage of the fact that every process was actually running in the same address space. According to Wikipedia, mainline Minix only gained 32-bit mode in 1997 (well after Linux had come into its own) and it still isn't clear whether it had memory protection by that point.
@@fluffycritter Sounds about right. There was no VM system... people often associate that with "swap space", but using disk as extra memory is only a cute consequence of a more sophisticated abstracted memory addressing architecture that takes advantage of an MMU, which allows for a whole lot of flexibility and power. It should also be noted that Tanenbaum and Torvalds had a back and forth over technical issues (largely microkernel/monolithic kernel) very early on, which caused some rough feelings. But Tanenbaum was always more of a researcher/pedagogue, rather than someone who thought the "quick and dirty" approach was appropriate. What he didn't count on was the community of very smart people who coalesced around Linux and rapidly developed what turned into a usable system. Torvalds was prescient in that sense. As to who was right... well, technological purity only gets you so far. Then again, MacOS is a very popular... microkernel-based OS. I think that argument ended thanks to Moore's law.
@@IcyTorment Torvalds is an expert technologist and good at what he does. Let the GNU socialist creeps sing Kumbaya around the campfire and play nice, Linus makes decisions he feels are best for the project. Playing nice is for little girls.
Oh man that goes back a long time. I had access to a Xenix system for a few months then some IBM RS/6000 systems came in and we went all in on AIX.
Wow! I entered the workforce at the age of 23 fresh out of college (business trade school). I had a good foundation of DOS at the time (DR-DOS actually) and the job I got was supporting construction accounting software that was being ran in Xenix, Altos, SCO Openserver 5, as well as Novell Netware. I never really took a deep dive into the history of it all, but now it is fascinating to watch this video on Arch Linux (btw) on my ThinkServer. It was a great experience.
Aww thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!
I made most of a career out of Xenix, from Tandy 1.3 on 16's and 6000's up through 2.3.2GT for 386 in the late 90s.
Haha ... I recognize some of my footage in your video :-) Good job, nice sheding a different perspective onto Xenix.
Thanks, yes indeed, your footage was most helpful! I was finished writing the script for this video when your video came out but I had a big lack of stock footage, owing to the fact that nobody seems to have covered Xenix, and I saw your video popping up, it was perfect timing! Hope you approve of it being reused and credited as such!
@@AlsGeekLab Sure, all fine! Glad it was of some use!
The one time I ever logged in to xenix, it was for a PC that ran the LED crawling display of call queues / times for a bank call center that wouldn't boot, on a saturday morning, and my girlfriend who supported their phone switch got paged out, and we couldn't go out tourizing till it was fixed . fsck and a reboot got us out the door in 5 minutes. This would have been late 80s after xenix was long expired....
I seem to remember some pretty nice networking capabilities in Windows for Workgroups (and even vanilla 3.11)... that would have been a couple of years before Win95? Also, NT was released a couple of years before Win95 as well.
Before TCP/IP became standard for LANs (due to the popularity of the Internet and UNIX-style networking), Windows systems used a variant of NetBIOS (the remnants of which are still around today, as Microsoft's Server Message Block filesharing originally used NetBIOS.) A competing standard was IPX/SPX from Novell.
Kind of hard for me to forget. Then again, I used a Model 16 with TRS-DOS 16 (I still have a floppy of it, actually), and had access to a one running Xenix (actually called TRS-Xenix) when I worked for Tandy at a Training and Resource Center. No, I don't have a floppy of that, either. Now, I do remember booting a copy of Linux on my Pentium computer with I can't remember now, was it two or three floppies? But that was after I left Tandy.
But UNIX is maybe not on everyone's desktop (although for sure it's on the desktops of those who have Macs)... but for sure it is in their pockets - with either Android being Linux based (which is UNIX clone) or iOS being de-facto UNIX 😉 Also: Windows NT was released 2 years before Win 95. Also OS/2, in which development MS had a significant part, also had a preemptive multitasking even before NT was released (back in 1988) What's interesting, MS knew that DOS is a stopgap solution and is basically "legacy" on the day it was released. And they tried to replace it ever since! Indeed Xenix was planned as an eventual successor, hence DOS 2.0 was meant to be as "transition" OS, with many "unix-y" features (you even included an ad from that time). Unfortunately various events happened: DOS became waaay too popular, so each successor must've been able to run DOS apps. And that was a big problem, because DOS being as primitive as it was, was basically not much more than a bootloader for apps which then had full access to the hardware. Intel, probably with MS feedback, equipped 386 with a kind of "virtualization" feature, that allows to abstract those DOS apps away. But 386 despite being released in 1985, needed many years to gain significant market penetration (until early 1990s I would say?) - and it couldn't be treated as a minimum requirement sooner. Another question completely, was a mess that UNIX licensing was back then. MS was also focused on OS/2 for a few years, which they seriously treated as a future OS. MS started developing NT in 1989, after hiring Dave Cutler from Digital. And aim was simple: to create a future OS (first as future OS/2, and then as a future Windows and DOS successor). From the beginning it was clear, that NT will replace DOS and Win 3.1/95 sometime in the future. It simple took waay too long than MS anticipated, mainly because of compatibility (despite NT was designed from the start to be maximally compatible with both DOS and Windows!) and performance. NT required a better hardware (mainly RAM) to support all those features. This entire transition and saga effectively ended with Windows XP in early 2000s.
Great information, which covers some small gaps in my footage here, so thank you!
linux desktop still exists, also the steam deck :P
NB: NT is i386 OS/2 v3 (which was declined by IBM), with WinAPI on top.
Should be clarified, that Linux is not UNIX, but UNIX-like, so not a derivative or a clone of UNIX. Linux is POSIX-compliant.
@@mardus_ee But I clarified that 😉 "with either Android being Linux based (which is UNIX clone)"
What a trip, I was kind of expecting it to end with a quick guide to how to acquire and run a copy today (for the retro nurds)
If you head over to pcjs you can run a copy of xenix in your browser. I believe that copies of xenix are available at archive.org.if you want to download
Awesome content! Back in about 1980 while I was working at (George) Morrow Designs (aka Thinker Toys), some guy at UC Berkeley was there writing a four user OS called uNix (microNix or mewNix) that ran on a fricking Z-80. I wonder whatever happened to it and him...
Excellent Vid. I had no idea MS made a version of xenix. Excellent work.
I don't think I ever knew about this but it reminds me that Microsoft also had a version of Java called Visual J++.
You skipped the part about the SCO Group really being the Caldera Linux crew, not the original Santa Cruz Operation.
Initial BSD releases consisted mainly of user programs, but that changed dramatically when the CSRG landed a contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to upgrade the communications protocols on their network, ARPANET. The new protocols were known as the Internet Protocols, later TCP/IP after the most important protocols. The first widely distributed implementation was part of 4.2BSD, in 1982.
Thank you for this. I have been working with MS products since the beginning of MS and somehow missed Xenix. I started out on 6502s with MS basic, some CP/M and sort of went to DOS on the 286.. Guess being in the home budget market it was out of sight for me at the time lol
Same here. Never heard of XENIX. I started from the Basic in the 80's and learned to code on ATARI then moved to DOS and 286 then to 386 and Win3.1 and then to Sun OS Unix in the early 90's. Then I started using Linux and never looked back. Although I still use Windows for some ocassional gaming and most of my business software runs on virtual Windows on the Proxmox server, but still most of laptops and PCs in my business and my company server run on Linux. Still this is an interesting bit of history.
I grew up with xenix, my father worked for the army corp of engineers. I would spend my time playing on a terminal on an altos 686.
@@szobione I read a lot of Australian magazines etc, so maybe it didn't really come up on the radar being business orientated, or maybe it wast promoted in Australia. Its interesting as I have a copy in some form of every OS I grew up using. And a copy of every early MS system (well, I do now lol )
@@blmartech It's interesting that I missed that one :) I did have encounters with Caldera DOS and DR DOS which I believe was derived from CP/M and I remember the lawsuits between MS and Amstrad. But apparently XENIX had vanished well before that so I don't know what part of XENIX lived on in the later derivatives.
Same here, I think it has a lot to do with systems like the Commodore 64 and 128 were big in Australia thanks to the likes of Kmart and Myer selling them. Going from Commodore basic to MS-DOS made sense and that’s what schools started teaching in the 90’s.
Thanks, never heard of it until now
Microsoft delayed the release of OS2 until after windows 3.1 was released. If you had both operating systems side-by-side, it was clear that a lot of windowing code was virtually identical, sharing the same off by one pixel bugs in the API calls. If OS2 had been released on time, it would have easily dominated the industry.
I guess Microsoft knew their relationship with IBM was doomed at one point. It must have caused Bill and Co a lot of sleepless nights when they pulled the plug on big blue and deliberately handicap OS2 in its final moments of need from the core (Microsoft) development team. Microsoft screwed IBM at that point and severed their umbilical cord. It was a huge gamble that paid off.
@@AlsGeekLab they also robbed artisoft by lying and refusing to release the details for windows 95's network stack to them so they could implement Lantastic as a native driver. Microsoft has done little to encourage real competition and fairness. They occupy the Linux board and now 50% of openai do they could turn it into a spam tool.
Thank you very much for this video.
10:18 MINIX was not open source in its early years. You had to have bought a copy of Tanenbaum’s _Operating Systems_ textbook in order to have access to it. Remember, the Linux project was started out of frustrations with the restrictions on working with MINIX.
Nice video! But two corrections (nicely meant ;) ... "System V" is not "system v" but it`s "system 5" - the "V" is the roman letter for "5". And "SCO" is not "sko" - it is "Ess Cee Oh" ... but the video on Xenix is very interesting. Thank you for that!
I never used XENIX, but I did support SCO back when I worked at IBM in the mid 90's. A large gov agency used SCO on IBM portables and I was the "unix" guy. When we had to work on their portables and IBM own PowerPC portable running AIX they came to me. SCO was the hardest operating system I have ever installed. I wasn't a fan. Caldera / SCO suing IBM was a death nail for them. By then I moved on to Solaris :)
The only thing I know about SCO is lawsuits against a bunch of big corporations running linux.
And funded by Microsoft.
As a one time user of their product this confused the hell out of me until I realized that SCO had sold the rights to trolls, which then assumed a similar name to look like they were the original company.
Commodore had a Unix for the Amiga as well. OSes were tiny things back then.
Commodore did not have a Unix for the 3000T/UX it was AT&T Unix. The Unix. I stand corrected.
@@joeturner7959 You have a typo. The Amiga 3000/UX with AT&T UNIX definitely existed. I own one to this day, an Amiga 3000T/UX complete with the A2410 graphics accelerator and a QIC tape drive.
@@kjrehberg Exactly: Again, AT&T said that machine was head and sholders above anything from apollo, sun, and NeXT.
Beautiful presentation! I am sure a great deal of research has been made to gather all this info. I didn't know there had been so many versions and ports. NS acorn coprocessor card was especially surprising to me, for example. If anything, this video whetted my appetite for more Xenix research on the web, so, thanks for making this!
Glad you enjoyed it!
I remember in the 90's when I worked for a company running SCO servers and watching that XENIX copyright going by at bootup.
Awesome video. Well done.
Thank you!!!
Xenix was incredible in a lot of ways, but we wouldn't have rich windows software libraries and incredible technological advancements that Microsoft powered if things had been different. Unix just isn't as good for backwards compatibility
"Unix instead of MacOS" ... isn't MacOS BSD and thus Unix based?
macOS is actually a certified UNIX.
Not the classic MacOS
@@eugrus I know it’s confusing, but Mac OS (with a space, and without an X) is the classic OS, and Mac OS X (with an X) and macOS (no space) are the UNIX based OS.
That model 16 running Xenix brings back memories!! :)
People forget that back in the 80's, we had a slew of choices in OS - I ended up working as a developer (during college vacations) on a system from MPSL called BOS - which provided multi use record locking in under 56k per user 'partition'. Those learnings always kicked my a** over the years, to remind me to be efficient in both run time and space for apps... I ended up in real time under (Open) VMS (okay, PDP folk, forgive me :/ ) and now just write specs and efficient SQL.. ah... those days of floppies.. the whippersnappers have no idea :/
I cut my sysadmin teeth on Xenix. 32 year's later I'm still using the same commands. Shout Out to #vi❤
hey, what was that arrow in the corner of the screen around 7:05 ?
My first job in the 80s as a programmer was on Xenix 3.0 running on an Altos 586, later upgraded to an Altos 986 with a whopping 1mb of memory. Sure the 8086 didn't provide a real protected VM system but Xenix was a full featured UNIX system. Next couple of years bounced around to different companies running SCO Xenix on 386 and 486 PCs, until landing in the finance industry which started embracing Sun servers and workstations in the early 90s. Who knows what would have happened if MS continued with Xenix and the UNIX wars had not happened (remember OSF vs USL vs BSD). Maybe we'd all be running Xenix v39.8. Pentium 3 topping 1ghz clock running Linux on commodity hardware killed all the commercial vendors and their custom UNIX variants. Could easily have been MS/SCO or even BSD.
Its still lives today as SCO OpenServer. $1499 for a TCP IP stack and $2000 for an ancient c compiler too! McDonald's and Wendy's used them for years. When you see a green screen terminal for fast food ordering it runs SCO aka Xenix. Xenix also ran on hospital systems until the early 21st century
Microsoft's own FTP servers used to run on Xenix back at the start of the 90s. there's a book about the history of Windows NT 'Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft ', good book
5:58 Worth pointing out that the 80286 was the first chip in Intel’s x86 line to offer hardware memory protection. Versions of Xenix before that would have relied entirely on the user software behaving itself and not randomly tromping on memory belonging to other processes or the kernel.
There were 286 and 386 versions of Xenix at one point...
Xenix does not predate the 80286. Don't be silly.
@@Theineluctable_SOME_CANT I would have to check the release dates, but it is not impossible to think that Tandy xenix predated Intel xenix. Tandy's 1.1 distribution on the 16 & 6000 - 68000 based machines - was already established in 82 when both me and my oldest boss got to it.
Xenix does indeed predate the 80286. See the diagram in the presentation. It covers 6800, z800 and others besides. As you can see, it is clearly running on a trs-80, which came out circa 1983, two full years before the 286 was on the market
@@Theineluctable_SOME_CANT Yes there was an 8086 version of Xenix. MS started the port but decided that the IBM PC was not powerful enough and that Xenix on the 8086 was stupid. SCO (partnered with MS) picked up the port and finished it. And result proved that the IBM PC *was* under powered and that Xenix on the 8086 *was* a dumb idea. But.... it ideally positioned SCO's development team to produce quality 286 and 386 versions later.
I wonder what Windows would be like now if it were based on Xenix instead of 9X or NT...
It would be worse
Maybe it would compatible with other unixes more less.
@@hye181 It would be better.
I ran an SCO Xenix system on an Apple Lisa in the mid 80’s. We had a 5 MB disk (profile) and used Apple II terminals using a Business Basic program for our finance system.
When I bought my first computer in 1986, a Schneider PC1512, it came with a handful of floppy disks. I think some were labelled Xenix 3.0
Which would have been an Amstrad??!?!
Thanks Al. This is a pretty good summary of that period in the history of modern computing. It's both interesting and somewhat concerning to read that Microsoft are still keeping a toe in the waters of Linux. I'm wondering whether this is another instance of their old tactics of 'embrace, extend and extinguish'?
I was potentially worried about it when WSL was first released and didn't know whether to believe Satya Nadella when he said "Microsoft ❤️ Linux", but it's been years now and there has been no evidence of extinguish. Linux, being open source and massively popular would be impossible to extinguish these days. I don't see it as competition for Microsoft now either, the two are working in symbiosis.
i just found out watching this video that the computer my uncle let me play Star Trek on (TRS-80) was running Xenix. I had no idea. I just knew how to turn it on, tell it to load the tape with the game on it.
Very cool! Great that you are finding that out all this time later!
14:41 Ah! Nostalgia. I sat there in the 3:rd row.
I had never heard of Xenix. But I'm old enough to have seen the advent of the Apple 3. I do remember when M$ teamed up with Sco to kill Linux. Windows isn't the 64bit whatever on 32 whatsis, etc. But M$ is still the 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition. Last I heard, they were offering code to the Linux makers in hopes that they're stupid enough to integrate the code so M$ can come back and claim ownership again. And don't forget that M$ didn't create their DOS. They bought it from someone else, and rebranded it.
I was thinking about getting a copy of Xenix for my 286 machine in the 80's
Kevin from the Office really slimmed up there and upgraded to selling software. Good for him
Is the Xenix source code available? Like to tinker with it and see if I could make a modern Xenix OS that would run on an arm or an AMD64 processor.
I don't think so
that looked pretty good 20:00 i didnt know thunderbird been around that long
Oooo MS Unix Complete with FORTRAN, COBOL, AND Pascal! Sign me up!
I think the approach to tie the OS closely with a programming language that also serves as the UI, as in the 8-bit CBM machines, was superior to operating systems with a meager command line (CBM machines had entire command screens) that only supports meager OS commands instead of a full-blown programming language, like BASIC, in direct mode.
I worked for a company in 1981 which was using the XENIX daughter card in a TRS-80 model II to attach large HD storage -- 5-10MB 8" platters!!!!
The IBM PC XT's PC/IX was even more obscure.
Instead of saying imagine the future that could have been…. imagine NOW instead! Xenix lives on in any UNIX Certified OS such as SCO UnixWare, SCO OpenServer, IBM z/OS and AIX, HP-UX and Apple macOS. iOS, FreeBSD, Darwin, OpenBSD also should thank Xenix…
Excellent Bill & Ted ref! 😊👍
Most Excellent that you watched it till the end! Totally non bogus!
@@AlsGeekLab 🤣👍
Hi, Great topic here. MAC OS is unix based.
I’d heard about Xenix but never gave it much of a thought. Cheers for this doco - excellent work as always sir 🎉 it’s got me looking up all sorts of info now lol
Used xenix back in 1986-87 and ran cad software on it called SuperCad
7:03 whats the pourpose of the orange arrow
I used to run Xenix with an Informix DBS
I used to do Xenix when I worked for Tandy Computer. We ran it on the 3000.
I just think it's amazing that a multi user, multi tasking operating system could run on a Tandy!
We had a Xenix test box in 1986 or so. Text only. For one user, very fast. Seemed sluggisharount 4 users. 286 based.
I worked on a software product that ran on Xenix way back then (mid-80's). It was legit. We sold hundreds of those systems to small businesses. Note to the vid's reader -- the "vi" editor is NEVER pronounced like the verb "vie", but simply "vee-eye".
Not "six"? ;-)
At least that's is darn easier to figure than pronouncing the wireless charging tech of Qi
@@paulstubbs7678 what's complicated about Qi? It's pronounced exactly the same as the chinese word Qi (chee), roughly meaning "life force / energy" which even ties in with the concept of... Charging.
Next you'll be calling ed, ee-dee! I've been coding since '81 and worked for 'The Open Group' maintaining the UNIX compliance software, only the office bore who worked in Cali in the 80's called vi vee-eye.
@@philiprowney it's hard to find a reference older the 2000 but any references I can find either shows the official pronunciation as vee-eye, or the vast major of users preferring that pronunciation, regardless of most common pronunciation when created, it seems like the world has decided VI needs to be separate letters at this point
They made this OS all the way up to the 386?! That's crazy man.
Wild, but even wilder is the fact that they used it to power their own mail servers, not Exchange!
@@AlsGeekLab Absolutely! It's like what?!
Yes sure if this is me or something but I can't click alot of things ingame, does anyone else have this problem?
Looking back on the history of micro computers, I can safely say that the world would have been a much better place had Steve Ballmer never existed.
12:53 That's wrong. Real preemptive Multitasking was available with Windows NT 3.1 in 1993. Windows NT 3.1 was released before Windows 95. And Windows 3.0 supported cooperative Multitasking for 16 Bit and later 32 Bit Windowssoftware in 1990 and preemptive Multitasking for DOS applications running inside Windows 3.x enhanced mode. The latter required a 386 CPU with Virtual 8086 virtualization.
"Nobody makes porting your software easier ... you simply recompile the original source code."