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.
These are kinds of stories that need to be written down for posterity, of we risk losing a lot of valuable information and backstories to some of the less successful technology products of our time.
One thing about Microsoft, is that they sure knew when to bail out. Exited the UNIX market before the infighting began (AT&T vs BSD UNIX, SCO vs the World, etc…) Then later left OS/2 to IBM. A company that was on its way out of the PC market.
You have mail.
I read somewhere that Paul Allen wanted to replace MS-DOS with Xenix before he left Microsoft in 1983.
What a different world that would have been. Win 3.11 and Win95+ on top of a *nix base is an interesting alternative history. Would NT still have been on top of the NT kernel or would MS have picked up Plan9?
As others have pointed out, Xenix replacing MS-DOS probably wouldn’t have happened because of AT&T’s licensing, but Sun found a way to make it happen. So maybe.
With *nix backed by MS, Linux would never have existed?
Hurd might have been brought up as a viable kernel. There would have been more pressure to do so.
Is Hurd a *nix based kernel ?
GNU is Not Unix, so nope…
I think it would have. Linus has stated he probably would have used a BSD instead of writing his own kernel if the AT&T vs BSD lawsuit hadn’t happened.
Maybe Linux is BSD based in this world?
He could not get 386BSD, by the time 386BSD came out Linux was already a thing.
Absolutely. MS isn’t a loser because they don’t have an operating system. They are a loser because they believe that closed software is better. You’d have the same issues that created the need for Linux. There were plenty of closed proprietary Unix’s out there when Linux came about.
The 90s ended a long time ago. Microsoft has done and embracing a lot of opensource in the last decade and a half.
Not sure you can compare the Sun world to the IBM PC world. Typically the bill for a Sun solution was so much larger than a typical PC that the percentage of the ATT license on the PC would have been monstrous.
True, but PCs have volume. I think they could have figured it out if they wanted to. Plus, BSD only had to replace 6 files.
Back then (1983) Unix was known as an “Open System’. No way would Gates gave gone for that, even though to call Unix open was just snake oil.
I’ve also read that. I think of that often. He was recommending a technical better solution. But ultimately Microsoft was probably better off financially by developing its own much worse offering. Same could be said for OS/2 to a certain extent.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
In hindsight this seems to be very true.