Indeed, without Unix there wouldn't have been the same rise of Mach, or the drive to make a portable VMS, as there wouldn't be a C either.
Many of the leaked internal tools to build NT reflect that all the back office stuff was on Xenix and VMS. Just as you can find mentions of emacs in the makefiles for NT, and how their life would be in jeopardy for changing the tab indentions.
Unix had such an incredible impact on the market that without it everything would be different.
Without Xenix micros would have continued to be snubbed by the high end crowd depriving that critical jump from machines that cost more than a large house to personal space.
What would be the portable OS to rule them all? TripOS is the best I can imagine. BCPL everywhere.
On Mon, Feb 4, 2019 at 6:34 AM +0800, "Clem Cole"
<clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
My vague (and rough) recollection is CP/M -> DOS -> Windows.
"Windows" == Win95 -- which was a user Interface spec the kernel died
IBM CP-DOS -> OS/2 --\
\
---> NT OS-2 -> NT/WIN ....... Today's Windows
CMU Mach --\ /
---> Mica -/
DEC VMS --/
When Cutler did Mica and then NT OS-2 he did not care what the user interface was. Mica was a pure uk and NT OS-2 was also, but by the time of the product it became a hybrid. Putting a different user interface, be it DOS, OS/2, Unix, VMS or Windows was in the kernel design.
Clem
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