There is some information and demos of the early
8086/80286 Xenix,
including the IBM rebranded PC Xenix 1.0 on
pcjs.org
https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/unix/ibm/xenix/1.0/
And if you have a modern enough browser you can run them from the browser as
well!
It's amazing that CPU's are fast enough to run interpreted emulation that is
faster than the old machines of the day.
That is a cool link. At the bottom of the page are two images of floppy disks. These show
an ISC copyright notice. Maybe this is because the floppies contained “extensions” rather
than Xenix itself.
===
Note that "IBM Xenix 1.0" is actually the same as MS Xenix 3.0, and arrived
after MS Xenix had been available for 4 years (initially for the PDP-11 and shortly after
for other CPU's):
http://seefigure1.com/2014/04/15/xenixtime.html
Rob Ferguson writes:
"From 1986 to 1989, I worked in the Xenix group at Microsoft. It was my first job out
of school, and I was the most junior person on the team. I was hopelessly naive,
inexperienced, generally clueless, and borderline incompetent, but my coworkers were kind,
supportive and enormously forgiving – just a lovely bunch of folks.
Microsoft decided to exit the Xenix business in 1989, but before the group was dispersed
to the winds, we held a wake. Many of the old hands at MS had worked on Xenix at some
point, so the party was filled with much of the senior development staff from across the
company. There was cake, beer, and nostalgia; stories were told, most of which I can’t
repeat. Some of the longer-serving folks dug through their files to find particularly
amusing Xenix-related documents, and they were copied and distributed to the attendees.
If memory serves, it was a co-operative effort between a number of the senior developers
to produce this timeline detailing all the major releases of Xenix.
I have no personal knowledge of the OEM relationships before 1986, and I do know that
there were additional minor ports and OEMs that aren’t listed on the timeline (e.g.
NS32016, IBM PS/2 MCA-bus, Onyx, Spectrix), but to the best of my understanding this hits
the major points.
Since we’re on the topic, I should say that I’ve encountered a surprising amount of
confusion about the history of Xenix. So, here are some things I know:
Xenix was a version of AT&T UNIX, ported and packaged by Microsoft. It was first
offered for sale to the public in the August 25, 1980 issue of Computerworld.
It was originally priced between $2000 and $9000 per copy, depending on the number of
users.
MS owned the Xenix trademark and had a master UNIX license with AT&T, which allowed
them to sub-licence Xenix to other vendors.
Xenix was licensed by a variety of OEMs, and then either bundled with their hardware or
sold as an optional extra. Ports were available for a variety of different architectures,
including the Z-8000, Motorola 68000, NS16032, and various Intel processors.
In 1983, IBM contracted with Microsoft to port Xenix to their forthcoming 80286-based
machines (codenamed “Salmon”); the result was “IBM Personal Computer XENIX” for the
PC/AT.
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.
Even with outsourcing retail development to SCO, Microsoft was still putting significant
effort into Xenix:
• Ports to new architectures, the large majority of the core kernel and driver work, and
extensive custom tool development were all done by Microsoft. By the time of the Intel
releases, there was significant kernel divergence from the original AT&T code.
• The main Microsoft development products (C compiler, assembler, linker, debugger) were
included with the Intel-based releases of Xenix, and there were custom
internally-developed toolchains for other architectures. Often, the latest version of the
tools appeared on Xenix well before they were available on DOS.
• The character-oriented versions of Microsoft Word and Multiplan were both ported to
Xenix.
• MS had a dedicated Xenix documentation team, which produced custom manuals and
tutorials.
As late as the beginning of 1985, there was some debate inside of Microsoft whether Xenix
should be the 16-bit “successor” to DOS; for a variety of reasons – mostly having to do
with licensing, royalties, and ownership of the code, but also involving a certain amount
of ego and politics – MS and IBM decided to pursue OS/2 instead. That marked the end of
any further Xenix investment at Microsoft, and the group was left to slowly atrophy.
The final Xenix work at Microsoft was an effort with AT&T to integrate Xenix support
into the main System V.3 source code, producing what we unimaginatively called the “Merged
Product” (noted by the official name of “UNIX System V, r3.2” in the timeline above).
Once that effort was completed, all Intel-based releases of UNIX from AT&T
incorporated Xenix support; in return, Microsoft received royalties for every copy of
Intel UNIX that AT&T subsequently licensed.
It will suffice, perhaps, to simply note that this was a good deal for Microsoft.”
It would be so cool if these early (1980-1984) Xenix versions were available for
historical examination and study.