18 Apr
2014
18 Apr
'14
1:10 p.m.
On 04/18/2014 09:31 AM, Robert Ferguson wrote:
I seem to recall that there are a number of people on
the list who are
interested in Microsoft Xenix.
For anyone who's so inclined, I just posted a short article that
includes a reasonably definitive list of all the platforms and releases
of Xenix (up to Microsoft's exit from the business), the original Xenix
announcement, a brief digression about how close we came to getting
Xenix instead of OS/2, and a couple of other related stories:
http://seefigure1.com/2014/04/15/xenixtime.html
Thanks for that. I've got some internal Acorn documentation which shows
that a Xenix port was at the very least under investigation (a partnership
with Logica) for their ns32k hardware, but it's nice to see a separate
mention of it.
I expect it never saw the light of day in any significant form; what I have
suggests they were having huge trouble achieving usable performance with
code running on the ns32k hardware and the 6502 side handling the I/O - the
8-bit link between the two was just too slow for mid-80's needs.
It wasn't too long after that when their ARM-based machines came about, and
then they started dabbling with OSes based on 4.3BSD, the Mach kernel, and
of course GUI-based RISC OS.
cheers
Jules