Microsoft's Ancient History w/ Unix 403
NutscrapeSucks writes "The Register is running
a article which discusses Microsoft's experience running their own version of UNIX, called Xenix, as their standard desktop operating system. Before they got involved with OS/2 and later NT, Microsoft considered UNIX to be the PC operating system of the future. Talks about Bill Gates running vi, difficulties with AT&T, and other interesting tidbits."
There's a lot of stuff everyone knows, and a lot of stuff you probably didn't
know. Worth a read.
Unix is the future. (Score:4, Interesting)
Shortcuts.. Symbolic links.
Multitasking..
How many others?
Not to troll, but a lot of Microsoft's innovations are actually recycled ideas that've been around for years. No, really, not to troll - I'm glad they've taken certain ideas from Unix. It wouldn't make sense for them to have not done so. There's a lot of good stuff in the various Unices out there.
This isn't surprising. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know why this in particular would stick out as something surprising. People on this site seem to forget that Gates is a serious geek - he's not some MBA who got lucky. I wouldn't be surprised if he _still_ uses vi, maybe even under Cygwin, on his own machines.
--saint
Re:Unix is the future. (Score:2, Interesting)
The others though are probably inspired from Unix, don't know of any other OS that unix might have been inspired of (well, except multics), anyone know?
Win NT was designed by the same people who designed VMS IIRC, so I suppose they got lots if inspiration from there as well
Spin is not correct (Score:3, Interesting)
-russ
There is no contradiction in MS philosophy here (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, they incorporated UNIX principles as desired into a new system that they felt could gain wider desktop acceptance.
If the author is indignant that MS rejected the precious UN*X philosophy (whose design goals could arguably be mutually exclusive with widespread desktop acceptance), he should just say it. If he really doesn't understand, his reasoning faculties should be brought into question.
Re:a glorified email terminal (Score:2, Interesting)
Xenix was a not very good Unix. It was not expecially bloated. It was not especially reliable, and not especially expensive. In fact, it was average.
However, it was promoted by MS, until they got bored with it, and sold it. I think it was a management buy-out, which involved MS agreeing never to make a competitive Unix - obviously, otherwise the management would have been shafted in weeks, when MS would have launched ZooNix or something and stolen the market, using a copy of the user base which they had "forgotten about" on a server somewhere. The Xenix name was later used for a version which could run on machines with little or no memory management - eg a 286. (Like Minix and Idris) This was a lame idea from the start, and did not survive the introduction of the 386 commercially.
Re:This isn't surprising. (Score:2, Interesting)
Cookies to doughnuts that Gates is just a competent programmer, no more, who was just a very good student of the Ancient Ways of IBM (remember, Big Blue was one the Evil Empire -- read "BIG BLUE: IBM's use and abuse of power", an account of the darker side of our "favorite" Linux company...) and who has this incredible drive to crush anything that might smell like competition.
Not to troll, but I will more readily accept accounts of Woz', Gary Killdall's or even Doug Enghelbart's (sp?) geekyness than those of billg's.
Re:Windows NT != VMS (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Windows NT == VMS (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Microsoft and UNIX (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm no expert on PDP11 operating systems, having only used RSX-11M and Unix V7m (the DEC distribution of AT&T Unix for PDP11s, I believe almost entirely used by Universities), but I think this is revisionist history.
I do believe that RSX-11M was the OS of choice for small systems or Real Time programming. RSX-11S, an offshoot of M for very small systems, was a dream to work with for very small footprint embedded systems, as I recall.
It's unfortunate that RSX-11M(+) supplanted IAS and RSTS/E, which were good time sharing systems, but I knew quite a few people who appreciated 11M for what it was good for.
Now this is definitely revisionist history. DEC provided device driver support and made releases of Unix V7 on PDP-11s as far back as 1978, IIRC. They were doing the same thing with BSD Unix on VAXs shortly thereafter (a little fuzzy on this).
Cutler's spent most of his life trying to snuff Unix, poor boy. The booming popularity of Linux in the server world running on those PCs must be incredibly frustrating to the NT hackers at MS who thought they were going to finally drive the last nails into the Unix coffin ...
Now, this sounds right. From what I've heard, Cutler does hate Unix and I'm certain that the ex-DECies at MS were on a mission.
Funny how NT was designed to run on multiple hardware platforms, I believe it first ran on MIPS in fact, but now you can get it on Intel only.
Microsoft Confidential source (Score:4, Interesting)
#!/usr/bin/sh
# Copyright (c) 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 AT&T
# All Rights Reserved
# THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T
# The copyright notice above does not evidence any
# actual or intended publication of such source code.
#ident "@(#)clear.sh 1.8 96/10/14 SMI"
# Copyright (c) 1987, 1988 Microsoft Corporation
# All Rights Reserved
# This Module contains Proprietary Information of Microsoft
# Corporation and should be treated as Confidential.
# clear the screen with terminfo.
#
It thought it rather amusing to see a Microsoft copyright there of all places. And the source is only two lines of code, one of them being exit. It's left as an exercise to the reader which line (first or second) is exit.
The other line is
Microsoft's early plans for XENIX (Score:5, Interesting)
"It's important to realize that MS-DOS is part of a family of operating systems....Providing the user with a family of operating system capabilities means a clear migration path from MS-DOS to XENIX. That means compatibility for both the terminal end user and the systems programmer.
A standard library for XENIX-86 C will allow compilation of a program on XENIX system and then execution on MS-DOS....XENIX systems will be able to function as network file servers."
So as you can see, Microsoft had big plans for XENIX back then. As it turned out, XENIX's place in the Microsoft family was first taken by OS/2, and then by NT.
- adam
Puzzled with the Cronology (Score:3, Interesting)
This was perhaps one of the first client server implementations of Configuration Management, very similar to what CVS is today. The server was this Xenix based 11/34 and the clients were PDP 11's running RSX-11M and the networking was homegrown protocols over serial links.
After I had been running this software for at least 18 months I remember being given a demonstration of a new version that our internal Xenix group had just received running on an early IBM PC (don't know the model, probably an AT - it was pre PS/2). This was because we were trying to decide on a platform for the client end a new version of our SCADA software that was to become client server and we were comparing XENIX (multitasking but no GUI interface - but at the time we were only replacing a system which used block graphic character based colour terminals), GEM (anyone remember that!) and Windows 2.0. We chose Windows for reasons I can't remember - but were able to dominate UK Water Company SCADA systems for most of the '80s
I was just after this that I was able to justify the purchase of a MiniVAX and a version of Unix System V for our Configuration Management server on the savings in maintenance costs over the PDP-11 and Xenix was ditched.
Re:Microsoft and UNIX (Score:2, Interesting)
The Architects: First, Get the Spec Right [microsoft.com]
"Once upon a time
"Every month, Nadine Kano prowls the halls of Redmond to profile the real folks behind Windows 2000 development. This month: David Cutler and Mark Lucovsky, who helped guide the operating system from its infancy."
Re:This isn't surprising. (Score:3, Interesting)
According to 'Hackers', Bill's BASIC program for the MITS Altair was big, slow, bloated, late, didn't work well, and (here's the kicker) required an expensive 4k memory expansion board from MITS that basically didn't work.
Compare to today, where we have Windows , which is... essentially the same, right down to the excessive hardware upgrade treadmill.
The point? Bill's spirit rules the place. Bill hasn't changed. I don't think he's learned ANYTHING in the technology arena except how to muscle it around with money. That's not the same as being a 'serious geek'. Essentially, he IS an MBA who got lucky.
It must be really sad. He's got all the money in the world, but it can't buy him cool points. So he sits there in his billion-dollar house, crying himself to sleep because he's still no closer to the nirvana of technical competence than he was back in 1977.
Software will flourish if Bill learns to accept his inadequacies and stop trying to take over the world.
Microsoft ported vi to windows...... (Score:2, Interesting)
Two interesting points (Score:3, Interesting)
Two interesting points which jumped out at me when I was reading Billy G's Unix Expo Remarks remembering that they were from October 9, 1996 were:
One of the exciting things we're announcing today is that our commitment to the Internet and to building a state-of-the-art browser extends not only to Windows 95 and Windows NT, but also to 16-bit Windows and the Macintosh and to Unix.
Explorer for Unix!
And this:
And the reason we do that -- it's not purely a magnanimous thing on our part. (Laughter.) We're doing that to promote the Active X technology, and by having the browser be out there very, very broadly...
Clearly an early vision of .Net!
First Unix/Xenix (Score:5, Interesting)
but there was no distribution. I wanted it to run it/sell it, seeing that
you could do the timesharing thing just like back at college, except
without a giant machine behind glass. I contacted the then tiny
Microsoft, asked, begged, pleaded but they had nothing to sell.
After multiple inquiries, they finally told me that they didn't have
Xenix yet, but they expected it to arrive shortly. Arrive? From where?
I was told, from Human Computing Resources (HCR) in Toronto.
Ahh, interesting. So I called HCR somehow got them to commit
to an early delivery. After a few weeks, and several dollars, the
day came. MS wanted a PDP-11 and 68000 version and was
only after the PDP-11 distro, I was 1 week ahead in the queue
from Microsoft. So, as I was told from HCR, I had the first Xenix
distribution in the US, ahead of Microsoft. I ran it on a LSI-11/23
with insanely expensive 256Kb of memory and a giant 20Mb
drive from Charles River Data Systems. It also had 2 eight inch
floppies (errrtt, clunk, clunk, errrrttt), and 2 four port serial cards
that each ran a VT100. The distro came on a 9-track tape (which
I still have) and the take drive was this weird, front loading thing
where you loaded the tape in the front like a big floppy and it
auto threaded the tape (sometimes). As I remember, it seemed
pretty fast, I'd start up stuff on all of the terminals, just to do it.
Of course, it wasn't that fast but at the time....
The Unix itself was a more or less pure Unix v7. The only thing,
as I remember that made is Xenix, was the boot message and
the captions on the man pages. There was no vi at that time,
the editor of choice was "ed". It did have a nice
and I got a Zork for it from a friend.
We ended up selling a few of the boxes. The company was
called MSD. The only record of such is in a 1981 (Jan?) issue
of Byte with our little ad in the back. And that's the story of the
first commercial Unix sold in the US.
Computer Lib / Dream Machines (Score:2, Interesting)
Consider Ted Nelson's revolutionary book _Computer Lib / Dream Machines_. This book changed my life. I ceased being a drug-crazed radical hippy and became a drug-crazed radical computer geek.
The first edition contained great tirades over IBM.
Then Microsoft Press bought the book, castrated it, and released the second edition. All of the heart and soul was gone from it. All of the anti-monopolistic material was removed.
The original edition is nearly impossible to find now. I haven't seen a single one since the second edition came out, about 1985.
I would treasure even a photocopy of the original.
Re:This isn't surprising. (Score:3, Interesting)
I would be suprised if he hadn't. Melinda is a LISP weenie.
Ever wonder who was in charge of Microsoft 'Bob' ?
Re:So true, so true (Score:1, Interesting)
At some point you guys have to define "geek" rather than playing it both ways. Most of the scrawny, greasy AV Room social misfits in my high school never showed any particular competence at anything at all. (That's not to say that they aren't screwing together PCs or installing Linux nowdays, just that's nothing to write home about.)
On the other hand you've got Paul Allen, Bill Joy, Linus Torvalds -- none of which seem like the kid who got swirlies from the football team.
If anything Gates is interesting because he defies his stereotypical looks and spaz-attack personality. (and for the kids out there, Gates actually washing his hair before going out in public is a recent phenomonon, much like the suits)
(yet another) My Xenix story (Score:3, Interesting)
The National Exhibition Centre ("NEC") in Birmingham, England had an inventory system running on Xenix in 1988. There were 5-10 terminals across the site, mostly Wyse VT terminals plus the console (VGA graphics).
I think the system was called "Impact" but I'm not sure. It had some problems in the UI with a large data set (all character-based graphics of course).
I got a job there as a student in my second year at University doing data entry. We would read an entry from a Kalamazoo paper based inventory book like "Rubber grommet, 1/16 cubit, 12.50/100, 12.5% discount, Acme Grommets" and convert it to a price each (yes, we had to throw away information) and enter it into the new system by hand.
I worked on the console of the server which was a 10MHz AT-clone which ran "like shit off a shovel" according to the vendor rep.
Every night I would back up the whole system to tape. I think it was a 250MB QIC cartridge, but I'm not sure. I know they had that distinctive metal plate on one side (a Travan NS20 is quite similar, but smaller, and 10GB).
In my lunch-hours I would read about strange things like "Bourne Shell" and "echo".
It was the first multi-user system I ever used so we all had fun looking at each others files.
I seem to remember making a directory called personal, which contained another called private, and in there a file called readme.txt, which contained only the words "aren't you nosy". Someone asked me about that within a week.
The Word processor was quite nice for the day and called "Lyrix". Unix systems in those days had real printed manuals which is good for beginners who don't know their way around. All the messages that Lyrix used could be overriden in a text file, so again we had a lot of fun with that.
I seem to remember I was being paid 100 pounds a week in total for a full-time job, and paying rent and running a car out of that. I lost quite a bit of weight that summer.
It shouldn't be. (Score:1, Interesting)
This really shouldn't surprise anyone. Coming from a CS background (Linux and Solaris), and growing up using DOS, I'm used to both sets of command-line tools. I'm sure BillG is, too. He wrote some of them.
Just because I work at Microsoft doesn't mean I don't understand what is important to geeks like the kind here at Slashdot. I just want to use my skills to improve the software that the most people use. More people use MS software, so that's why I'm here. I've been here less than a year, but if you look around MS, you'll find a lot of others here for the same reason.
Re:Computer Lib / Dream Machines (Score:2, Interesting)
For a packerback book not even thirty years old, this must be some kind of record!