
The Death of Xenix (1997) - tshtf
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2062
======
contingencies
Choice quote: _The Linux community must agree upon a single software
installation and management scheme, just as it standardized file system
layouts._

~~~
Pacabel
By and large, I think the community already has. dpkg is the clear winner,
with the most widely used distributions (Mint, Ubuntu and Debian) all using
it.

RPM isn't dead by any means, but I think its continued existence is merely an
accident of history at this point. As more and more people and organizations
migrate away from Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS and openSUSE/SUSE Linux, I think we'll
see its relevance and importance drop off significantly.

~~~
reirob
Do you have any sources for "As more and more people and organizations migrate
away from Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS and openSUSE/SUSE Linux"?

I would like to see one standard to win, but in my environment I do not see
big companies going away from RedHat or SUSE. So I am curious to see if there
is some trend building up.

------
pjmlp
Xenix was my first UNIX experience in 1993, after almost 10 years of coding
experience in home computers.

That command line experience compared with the Amiga GUI of the time was a bit
of meh experience.

The only thing left was my curiosity for OS design and delve into UNIX, while
at the same time my teacher gave me the sad news that there wasn't a Turbo
Pascal compatible dialect for it and I really needed to use C.

------
greatquux
Whenever these old articles get posted, I find myself reading them almost
entirely for the sense of borrowed nostalgia. I was playing games on my C64 at
the time, maybe playing around with BASIC, not this, so it's not real
nostalgia. Still, I love reading about computer history that I never
experienced and thinking "oh gee what a simpler time that was..."

------
breckinloggins
I have this crazy idea that Microsoft could pull itself out of the "meh"
gutter by becoming a Unix OEM again.

As a longtime developer, I'm certainly not representative of the general
computing population, but I have to think that part of Microsoft's long and
painful decline is due to a new generation of computer geeks simply not
wanting to use Windows. If Valve can break through the Linux gaming barrier
with Steam OS, this could spell the eventual end for Windows as an OS that
anyone voluntarily uses.

In my (admittedly naive) view, I see legions of young computer hackers who
want to write apps, games, and server things. I see them asking the "elders of
the internet" what system they should use for programming, and I see them all
getting the same answer: "get a Linux box, or at least a Mac if you like it
nice and shiny". So they go off and get a Linux box or a Mac. The point is:
what they get is a Unix system, and that's what they will come to be familiar
with.

At some point their parents or friends will ask them what kind of computer
they should get. If they don't say "why do you need a computer? Just get a
tablet." they'll probably steer them towards a Mac... partly because of the
"it just works" reputation and partly because, well, it's a Unix system, and
they KNOW this. And so goes the cycle of OS popularity. A large portion of
"what tech should I buy" seems to trickle down from the tech geeks in every
family or peer group, and as time goes on there will probably be more and more
of those.

So where does Windows fit into this? Visual Studio is nice but otherwise
everything is just... different. It used to be that Windows was "normal" and
UNIXy things were a bit different, because everyone "normal" used Windows.
Now, that situation is becoming reversed.

Personally, I quite like what Microsoft has been doing lately, but no matter
how shiny I think their new stuff is , I really don't want a non-UNIX OS on my
desktop. I want a normal command line with bash or zsh. I want a homebrew or
apt-get package management system, and I want a system where no matter what
software package or library I want, I know I can always git clone or untar it,
then run ./configure && make && make install.

You can kind of get there on windows with SFU and Cygwin, but it still doesn't
feel quite right. I think Microsoft could gain a strong second following with
the tech geek crowd by committing to a complete POSIX layer, proper fork(), a
unified file system, a proper terminal (even though powershell is cool), and
an "it just works" philosophy when it comes to GCC and clang and all the open
source software and libraries available online. If they can do this before
their "windows is for gamers" window closes, I think they can get back a lot
of their lost tech geek crowd and then enjoy the reputation and recommendation
trickle down that inevitably follows.

I have absolutely no evidence to back up this advice; I just know that if
Microsoft said "Windows 10 will be a certified UNIX", I would strongly
consider replacing my Mac with one of those nice Lenovo Yoga laptops.

~~~
tanzam75
Suppose Microsoft does this with Windows X -- releases a version of Windows
with an top-notch UNIX subsystem and excellent tooling.

All the geeks tell their families to buy Windows PCs, because it "has UNIX
underpinnings!" Microsoft splits the UNIX workstation market right down the
middle with Mac, and Microsoft's share of the PC market increases from 92% to
96%.

How does this help Microsoft financially?

Desktop Windows accounts for only 23% of Microsoft's revenues. So Microsoft's
overall revenue increases by 1%. But its costs also increase, because they
will have to maintain this UNIX environment. Its costs may even increase by
more than 1%, because the dev work won't be trivial. Not great for profits.

Does it help them sell Windows Server licenses? No. Developers code on the
Macbooks today and deploy to Linux -- not to Mac OS X Server.

Does it help them sell Azure? I can't see how. Same logic as Windows Server.
And Microsoft tries to make a profit. Amazon does not. Thus, Amazon can beat
them at pricing.

Does it help them sell Office? There's already a version of Office for the
Mac.

Does it help them sell smartphones and tablets? There's still one heck of a
chicken-and-egg problem. Developers are more likely to run the Android tools
on Windows X. In fact, the Android tools will now run even better on Windows
X, because of the improved UNIX support.

It does get Microsoft some "street cred," but how do you turn street cred into
profits? Maybe if Microsoft had done this in 1999, then it could've prevented
OS X from taking hold as the preferred UNIX workstation of the developer
crowd. But in 2014, with Linux and MacOS and Android and iOS already well-
established?

Frontal assaults are a hard way to win a war. Better to go around the flank.
Apple had single-digit share of the PC market when it scored a runaway hit
with the iPod.

P.S. Services for UNIX has been deprecated. The last release was in 2010.

~~~
yuhong
_Maybe if Microsoft had done this in 1999, then it could 've prevented OS X
from taking hold as the preferred UNIX workstation of the developer crowd. _

What is funny is that I believe MS acquired Interix in 1999.

~~~
RyJones
And was POSIX.1 compliant before that.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem)

------
yuhong
Ah, one of the early 386 protected mode OSes, developed back when MS/IBM was
focusing on the 286 for OS/2\. To be honest, I think 386s was expensive back
then.

~~~
pekk
> Ah, one of the early 386 protected mode OSes, developed back when MS/IBM was
> focusing on the 286 for OS/2\. To be honest, I think 386s was expensive back
> then.

I don't think this is accurate. Xenix pre-existed the 386 and was used on
other processors before and after it supported the 386.

Since I thought maybe I was going crazy, I checked Wikipedia and read, for
example, "Version 2.0 of Xenix was released in 1985 and was based on UNIX
System V. An update numbered 2.1.1 added support for the Intel 80286
processor"

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Couldn't Xenix run even on an 8086? I don't think it required an MMU at all.

