Help on Altos 586 system...

Jeff Kaneko wrote: The 586 was not the first Xenix system from Altos -- their first as I recall was an overpriced and unreliable 68000 system. The TRS-80 Model 16 blew it away, so Altos switched over to the 8x86 and after a while converted to SCO -- as Tandy did later, much to my annoyance. Microsoft was never able to create a viable consumer product out of Xenix, although they picked up a lot of good ideas during the effort of starting the project, which is why MS-DOS went beyond its CP/M-clone beginnings to add features such as the tree directory, (fake) I/O redirection, (fake) pipes, (fake) device independence, etc.. starting with version 2.0. They sublet the project to Altos, Tandy and SCO in that order, which companies actually produced products. SCO having no other business _except_ software naturally went for the 8x86 market, and eventually dominated that end of the Unix business for quite a few years, and now they own the rights to all of the original AT&T source code via the buyout from Novell. Of course, they're losing ground to Linux every day. And they _don't_ own the Unix trademark -- that's owned by The Open Group. <http://www.opengroup.org/public/tech/unix/trademark.html> (Tandy Xenix is where I fell into the black hole of Unix, and there's a Tandy 6000HD with a slightly ailing hard disk controller less than six feet from me which I _will_ resurrect). Oh, Altos Xenix appeared in early '82, Tandy Xenix in Jan '83, and SCO started shipping software in Sept '83. The latter two from personal memory, as I was actually paying attention at the time. The initial SCO offering for the XT left much to be desired, the AT version was a _lot_ better, but they conquered the market with Xenix/386. -- Ward Griffiths Two thousand yeare since Bethlehem and still we hear the lie, that after years of hopes and fears the best part's when we die.