
Tales from the Xenix Crypt (2017) - beefhash
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/tales-from-the-xenix-crypt/
======
MrTonyD
Just seeing that boot screen brings back memories. I must have installed XENIX
more than a hundred times during my 6 years at SCO. It's too bad that
Microsoft bribed them out of existence - we had developed a full office suite
when Microsoft realized that we would be a real competitor. So Bill
essentially guaranteed us a monopoly in exchange for killing the office suite.
(Modern monopolies are "effective monopolies", created by product
differentiation. So killing selective features in Windows can allow a
competitor to create an "effective monopoly" over a market segment. Since the
legal definition of monopoly is so antiquated, as consumers we are surrounded
by effective monopolies which should be illegal - but aren't.)

~~~
tomcam
So there was a full office suite that ran under XENIX? Was it ever released?
Character mode, graphics mode? Did it have printer drivers? Do you remember
the name? I'm fascinated by the idea of an unreleased piece of work that
significant.

~~~
MrTonyD
We developed it and sold it initially to the government - using that revenue
to make it stable. It was Lyrix word processor and a spreadsheet and graphics
program (the graphics program was pretty bad, but the spreadsheet had gone
through a few major revisions and was getting competetitive with Lotus 123
(the major spreadsheet at the time.) So sure we had printer drivers and
WYSIWIG, kind of like WordPerfect which was the major competitor at the time.
Microsoft was still trying to assemble all the pieces of an Office Suite and
get users from MSDOS to Windows. After meeting with Bill, and promises to
break Windows networking so that UNIX could have the TCP/IP-based back-office
business, we killed it. (So people who can't figure out why networking was
broken for so long in Apple and Windows products just don't know the trades
which were made.)

~~~
mixmastamyk
What does broken mean in this context?

~~~
cpach
IIRC, Windows 3.x didn’t have a TCP/IP stack. One had to install additional
software such as Trumpet Winsock in order to connect to Internet.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Thought it was about the limits of netbios and appletalk, but lack of tcpip is
probably another factor. I worked with netware/ipx at the time.

~~~
MrTonyD
Apple had installed the entire networking code from UNIX under appletalk. But
Steve personally fired the head of Apple networking. Then he fired the next
engineering manager too, until he got one who wouldn't keep trying to expose
the full tcp/ip capability that they had built into the Apple kernel. So the
initial capability was appletalk with low cost chips, but their tech guys
quickly realized that they needed more. There is a lot of unpublished history
- a lot of it completely illegal in order to build the fortunes of the tech
leaders (and not just Apple, Microsoft, and SCO.)

------
gattilorenz
A few years ago I was in love with Xenix, and I managed to track down a fairly
sizable collection of software that was not openly available, including the
Developement system.

Some of these did not have any working serial/key pair, so a friend wrote a
k&r c program that printed a sh file that ran brand with every activation key
for a given serial... Took a couple of minutes in a virtual machine to find
the correct one, but it never felt like a neat solution.

Then in 2017 I found this post... And the neat solution I was looking for.

------
userbinator
_it’s probably that 30-year old copy protection is relatively easy to break
using tools and computing power that did not exist 30 years ago_

Even 30 years ago this would not have been strong at all. With 3 lowercase
letters the keyspace is effectively 26^3 or 17576. Add digits and it's still
just 36^3 = 46656. That's _tiny_. I suspect it wasn't made larger partly due
to the crypto export regulations, and the fact that "big company" software
like this mainly used protection schemes to keep honest users honest. The
shareware/trialware of the time had far more devious techniques.

~~~
bitwize
Amiga games, spinning the disk at _variable speeds_...

------
pjmlp
Ah Xenix, my introduction to UNIX.

Our teacher used to carry a 486 PC tower into the class, where each group
would take rounds at it, using the code that we initally prepared on MS-DOS.

It was a bit like using cards for programming, given that we could not test
nor compile UNIX IPC code on MS-DOS.

------
mirimir
> You don't have permission to access /wp/tales-from-the-xenix-crypt/ on this
> server.

Not very friendly at all.

