[TUHS] Re: Dave Cutler recollection about Xenix

On Sat, Oct 21, 2023 at 11:37 AM Paul Ruizendaal <pnr(a)planet.nl> wrote: An interesting set of videos indeed, although I wish they were not all chopped up in 5 minute segments. The alternative nowadays is for YouTube to chop videos up themselves with commercials. The below site has a very nice summary of Xenix at Microsoft (I’ve linked it a couple of times before): http://seefigure1.com/2014/04/15/xenixtime.html By this time, there was growing retail demand for Xenix on IBM-compatible personal computer hardware, but Microsoft made the strategic decision not to sell Xenix in the consumer market; instead, they entered into an agreement with a company called the Santa Cruz Operation to package, sell and support Xenix for those customers. That's not entirely true.  The first personal computer I used was an IBM PC/AT, and I bought MS-branded Xenix (System III) for it.  It was a box full of floppies, and it came with the MS C compiler (CL.EXE etc.) which could compile for Xenix or cross-compile for MS-DOS.  That way I could write command-line programs on Xenix and deliver them for DOS.  In a way it is the same dynamic that kept C89 and Bash in place for so long: people know it, it is good enough and it works everywhere. C89 has plenty of obvious successors; bash does not. Seeing the Cutler interviews reminded me of the old joke that there are only two operating systems left: Unix and VMS (Linux being Unix-family and Windows being VMS-family). OS/360 (now in the form of z/OS) is still very much with us.  z/OS is Posix-certified, but it is fairly distant from Linux, *BSD, or Solaris.  (It is not to be confused with Linux running on System Z virtualized.)