18 Mar
2021
18 Mar
'21
2:15 a.m.
On Wednesday, 17 March 2021 at 21:33:37 +0100, Josh Good wrote:
Hello UNIX veterans.
So I stumbled online upon a copy of the book "SCO Xenix System V Operating
System User's Guide", from 1988, advertised as having 395 pages, and the
asked for price was 2.50 EUROs. I bought it, expecting --well, I don't know
exactly what I was expecting, something quaint and interesting, I suppose.
I've received the book, and it is not a treasure trobe, to say the least. I
am in fact surprised at how sparse was UNIX System V of this age, almost
spartan.
I'm surprised that nobody else mentioned this, but XENIX System V and
UNIX System V were two very different beasts. I've used both, and
XENIX is considerably worse.
And that's it. The communications part only deals
the Micnet (a
serial-port based local networking scheme), and UUCP. No mention at
all of the words "Internet" or "TCP/IP", no even in the Index.
It was available, and I had it installed. In fact, somewhere I still
have the media, though it's unlikely that they're still readable. But
like Interactive UNIX System V/386 (if I have the names, it was
commercially oriented and sold each individual component separately,
separate media, separate documentation, and these bloody license keys.
I'm probably spoiled from Linux having
repositories full of packaged
free software, where the user just has to worry about "which is the
best of": email program, text editor, browser, image manipulation
program, video player, etc. I understand this now pretty well, how
spoiled are we these days.
Yes, I had BSD/386 at the same time I actually had to use XENIX, and
the difference was like night and day. I moved as much of my
development environment to BSD as possible, not helped by XENIX's lack
of NFS. I'm not sure it even had X.
Greg
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