And Usenet was tin cans and a string. --al (feeling very old)

Josh, The appeal was that SCO Xenix would turn a PC into a multi-user machine. For me, that meant shared databases and shared applications. We would run anywhere from 3 to a dozen or more "dumb" terminals. Unlike a DOS PC, SCO Xenix included most of the UNIX tools. At one time, it even included PWB. Just like a DOS based PC, applications like Word Perfect and Lotus 123 were available (for a price). My $.02 Jim From: "Josh Good" <pepe(a)naleco.com> To: tuhs(a)tuhs.org Sent: Wednesday, March 17, 2021 4:33:37 PM Subject: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse! 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. The chapter titles are: 1. Introduction 2. vi: A Text Editor 3. ed 4. mail 5. Communicating with Other Sites 6. bc: A Calculator 7. The Shell 8. The C-Shell 9. Using the Visual Shell 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. Granted, this Xenix version is derived from System V Release 2, and I think it was for the Intel 286 (not yet ported to the i386), but hey it's 1988 already and the Internet is supposed to be thriving on UNIX in the Pacific Coast, or so the lore says. I see now that it probably was only in the Berkely family that the Internet was going on... In truth, I fail to see what was the appeal of such a system, for mere users, when in the same PC you could run rich DOS-based applications like WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Ventura Publisher and all the PC software from those years. I mean, mail without Internet is pretty useless, althouhg I understand it could be useful for inter-company communications. And yes, it had vi and the Bourne Shell. But still, it feels very very limited, this Xenix version, from a user's point of view. 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. -- Josh Good

On Wed, 17 Mar 2021 at 16:52, Josh Good <pepe(a)naleco.com> wrote: Not a total surprise. In 1988, the average home user had probably barely even heard of the internet. Even business users were only concerned with on-site networking, and that was a fairly expensive proposition. Indeed, from the perspective of a home user you didn't really need an expensive UNIX box to do normal household chores. I was more than happy with a Visual 1050 running CP/M (and Wordstar, Multiplan, etc.) well into the late '80s. Which might well explain why Xenix failed to gain much ground with normal folks at home. If you used a UNIX at work, sure, you might want to pay the money to have it at home. But why spend the $ for an operating system that didn't have widespread application development? The proliferation of free software is practically unthinkable from the standpoint of a home user 30 years ago. -Henry

On Wednesday, 17 March 2021 at 21:33:37 +0100, Josh Good wrote: 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. 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. 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 -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA