Microsoft brings UNIX to the Desktop?
 

OK so I was perusing a fine UNIX book that I own and noticed a write up that was rather odd. It seems that in 1980 Microsoft (M$) released XENIX, a variant of UNIX designed to work on microcomputers or PC's. XENIX dominated the UNIX Market along with the BSD system and SunOS. They were all brought together in UNIX System V Release 4, and for a few years mabye even still SCO paid M$ to sell UNIX.

Somebody tell me I'm wrong!

So, basically M$ paved the way on microcomputers even before windows.... Even crazier is that while all this was going on many computer companies started to have concerns that AT&T and Sun had a competitive advantage due to their control of UNIX System V. Ok can we say major role reversal here????

Anyways, I thought this was very interesting. I suppose that MS won't ever do an Open Source Project since they had already conquered the *NIX market once before!

I do have a question though. Are there any remnants or versions of M$ code in current Linux applications? There would have to be some kind of irony in that!

All the trash talkin that is done about M$ and they *NIX'd before Linux!

I am speechless!

Was XENIX opensource? If it was, then there might be some code out there... but if it was closedsource, no one can even get to look at the code. It can be *nix, but not release the code.

I've heard of Xenix before, but never really thought of it.

Xenix on wikipedia

I don't really see the point of saying Microsoft beat Linux because of Xenix. Did it exist? Yes. Could it be said that Microsoft "already conquered the *NIX market once before"? Not with a straight face. Further, Microsoft did not own or create Xenix, they licensed it from SCO. You seem to have that fact backwards and believe that Microsoft was being paid by SCO so they could sell their own product or something.

Was there a Microsoft version of Un*x available for the IBM architecture? Yes. But it hardly can be said to have dominated the Unix market or the desktop market. It was a small market at best and was eventually dropped by Microsoft. Was it popular? Well, a little but that was mainly because it was the only option if you needed Unix on that hardware.

There are other reasons to believe Linux was a failure ;) but Xenix isn't one of them. There are no bits of Xenix code in Linux. If there are, then they were taken improperly by someone and need to be removed. But since I believe that case is groundless, I doubt any code exists.

Wikipedia on Xenix:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix

Yes, it's true.
You're not!
And all the while, Microsoft continued using Xenix internally. They only started phasing it out with the release of W2K.
No. All GPL code was written from scratch. There is none of the old Unix code in Linux at all. None. Linus started it from scratch.
Exactly. They know the power of Unix. They know that Linux is much better than Unix ever was. They're really counting on this DRM crap to lock Linux out of the market.

Frob23,
This is a quote from WikiPedia in case you didn't check your facts before flaming me!
"When Microsoft entered into an agreement with IBM to develop OS/2, it lost interest in promoting Xenix. In 1987 Microsoft transferred ownership of Xenix to SCO in an agreement that left Microsoft owning 25% of SCO. When Microsoft eventually lost interest in OS/2 as well, it based its further high-end strategy on Windows NT."

Microsoft didn't purchase anything from SCO. I did some googling and it looks as though SCO still pays MS for licensing.

Another Quote:

In the late 1980s, Xenix was, according to Samuel J. Leffler et al. in The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System (1989), "probably the most widespread version of the UNIX operating system, according to the number of machines on which it runs" (p. 7).

Yes I have the updated version of the book and am familiar with its contents and it says pretty much the same thing with slightly different wording and on page 8 this time. :rolleyes: But you'll note that this is widespread and common... not dominating like your original post asserted. It's a vastly different thing. Linux is the most common *nix out there if you count all the machines it's installed on. But that isn't to say that it dominates the market. Domination implies that it drives the market and controls it. I know of no synonym for dominate which means "common". Perhaps you do?

And, from that same wikipedia article, "Xenix was a version of the Unix operating system, licensed by Microsoft from AT&T in the late 1970s. The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) later acquired exclusive rights to the software, and eventually began distributing it as SCO UNIX." Microsoft licensed the code from AT&T... the ownership of all this changed hands several times throughout the years and, to the best of my knowledge, now lies in SCO's hands. It's a hazy past but fairly easy to pin down.

If SCO was paying Microsoft for the rights to XENIX at some point, it was through some odd sort of agreement. I think the following is a simple enough read to get most of the points across (http://www.vcnet.com/bms/features/tale.shtml) although simple use of the web and searching will back up all of the statements made in it. If SCO is still paying Microsoft for code it doesn't want and developed itself, I would love to read about it.

My facts are right or at least approximate correctness where at all possible and my humanity does not intrude (I do check them). I did imply that Microsoft licensed it from SCO (which was supposed to be AT&T) and that they didn't create it (they contracted SCO to do that for them). And the rights and ownership may have been weird -- so convoluted that eventually SCO did end up paying for code that it created when it obtained Unix. It's a backwards world at times... but your original post still blows a minor nothing into a world of conspiracy or whatever. Yeah, Microsoft had a *nix, yeah it was common... so?

It's easy to forget now that there was a time when pretty much everybody (universities, big companies, governments, small children...) had a UNIX-derived system. The days of the UNIX wars, those were.

-- Hearsay, and maybe heresy, follow. --

Actually, methinks that things are shaping up that way again. Your five big players today (from my perspective) are Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, *BSD, and Solaris. As Windows advances, it adopts more and more features found in modern Unix systems. Linux is already a Unix-system, as are the BSDs and Solaris. Mac OS X is based strongly on the BSD Unixen. So in a way, 95% of the desktop & server deployments (proportion of all deployments ever) is like a battle of the Unix all over again.