Comment by pjmlp

5 hours ago

Traditional reference how Microsoft was doubling down on UNIX with Xenix, before having a change of heart.

The Future of Xenix, Bill Gates Interview on Unix World, back in 1985

https://archive.org/details/Unix_World_Vol02_10.pdf

Xenix was targeted at a hardware spec that was well out of reach for the ordinary home PC consumer. The amount of ram and HDD needed to install and run it would make a computer in 1985/1986 money equivalent to a $12,000 desktop today. They always knew they needed to keep developing DOS for the low end.

  • Sure, but as the article points out, had it not been for the change of heart, Xenix light could have been something like Coherent.

    Having learnt UNIX on Xenix, I know how expensive it was, we had a single tower that the teacher carried on into class, while we in groups of 2 students had about 15 minutes time slots to try out our applications that we prepared on MS-DOS ahead of time with Turbo C 2.0.