History Of Xenix — Microsoft’s Forgotten Unix-based Operating System

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

 

 

Writing Microsoft and Unix in the same sentence is something you’d like to avoid. However, the history books documenting the early days of Redmond tell a different story.

Turning back the pages to the late 1970’s, Microsoft entered into an agreement with AT&T Corporation to license Unix from AT&T. While the company didn’t sell the OS to public, it licensed it to other OEM vendors like Intel, SCO, and Tandy.

As Microsoft had to face legal trouble due to “Unix” name, the company renamed it and came up with its own Unix distribution. So, AT&T licensed Unix to Redmond that was passed on to other OEMs as Xenix.

It’s interesting to recall a time when Microsoft enabled people to run Unix — an operating system originally designed for large and multiuser systems — on a microcomputer. Even though it came first, Unix was probably more powerful than MS-DOS.

 

Source: http://fossbytes.com/xenix-history-microsoft-unix-operating-system/

[Torolol]

https://www.neowin.net/news/trivia-tuesday-xenix---microsofts-forgotten-os

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

That was a 2012 article, this is a 2016 one...