I remember Xenix back when I was in high school. I had a copy lying around but there was so much dev activity on DOS then Windows that it was relegated to the pile of ignored OSs.

✅ Microsoft's Xenix - by John Paul Wohlscheid
https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/microsofts-xenix?triedRedirect=true
#xenix #Microsoft

Does anyone have a copy of “Porting Xenix to the Unmapped 8086” by Hare and Thomas? Proceedings of the Winter USENIX Conference 1984.

C’mon. I know one of you has to have a copy.

#unix #xenix #usenix #retrocomputing

Turned out the patch might not be needed on my Xenix 1.00 disks. Tried stepping through install. Went as hoped (with a few glitches) until finally it asked to boot from the HDD. Then, oops. No /boot for me!

Well, I also stuffed up the time zone (I don't live in the US and messed up setting the "Other" timezone), so I get to blow away that massive 20 MB Type 2 HDD and try again with knowledge now earned and learned.

#vm #retrocomputing #xenix #linux

Playing around with Xenix. Managed to get 2.0 running in PCem, albeit now I need to do a bit of reading to learn how to configure it and use it.

I'd like to take a swing at Xenix 1.0, but looks like I need to patch Install and another disk before it will work in PCem. I have the patch, but it needs Python 2.x, so either I rewrite it for 3.x, or I revive my 10-years-dead 2.7.6 environment.

This one is part of my self-learning-how-to-Linux track.

#vm #retrocomputing #xenix #linux

Backport Wisdom

"The reason is that they don’t buy the IBM answer as the only answer. The saying in the US is “nobody ever got fired for picking IBM.” That’s not a saying in Europe."
~Doug Michels, January 1987

#tallship #Microtimes #SCO #Logica #IBM #XENIX

⛵

.

It strikes me that #MSDOS started gaining #Unix features, most notably file descriptors, FD-related system calls, and directories/folders, beginning with version 2.

Version 1 was heavily influenced by CP/M, but then it took a hard left turn toward Unix in version 2.

But I guess I shouldn't be surprised. #Microsoft was selling an actual Unix at the time too, namely #Xenix.

#DOS never got Unix-style multitasking, though. Apparently MS expected people to buy Xenix or Windows if they needed that.