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Comment by cpeterso | Hacker News Reader

> The first release of NT is planned as a workstation product that will provide a strong competitor to UN*X based workstations.

UN*X spelling for trademark reasons or a joke that UNIX is verboten at Microsoft?

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That was back when there was "real" UNIX around, as well as a number of clones, including Microsofts own Xenix (maybe they had offloaded that to SCO by then). So UN*X was one way to indicate that it meant UNIX-like OSes.

Turns out SCO bought Xenix in 1987, but Microsoft was just a couple of years removed from being the biggest Unix vendor around at this point.

I guess that's probably Apple now.

Or IBM?

z/OS is officially a Unix

There are an awful lot of iOS and macOS devices out there

macOS is a certified UNIX[0], but iOS isn’t.

—

[0] https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

I still think Macs outnumber IBM mainframe and POWER machines by a couple orders of magnitude.

By unit count, no question.

By revenue? Genuinely uncertain.

IIRC Microsoft's internal email still ran on Xenix at the time (until Exchange betas got good enough for internal use c. 1995?), so perhaps more trademarks than some sort of absolute hatred of Unix. Also note that one of the two APIs that NT OS/2 was initially going to support was POSIX, albeit perhaps more because the US government wanted that than a true love of UNIX. Although the design rationale document (ntdesrtl) does lament that existing POSIX test suites tend to also test "...UNIX folklore that happens to be permissible under an interpretation of the POSIX spec".

Did Microsoft never run Microsoft Mail internally?

It was an email system that ran on top of file system. If I recall, mail clients connected over a networked drive to access mailboxes. So it was never regarded as being very scalable.

Yes, MS Mail for PC Networks used a shared file system for email.

The Workgroup Apps (WGA) divison ran MS Mail for PC Networks since they produced MS Mail. Gotta dogfood your product. The WGA email system used a Xenix gateway to connect with the rest of Microsoft.

The rest of Microsoft ran MS Mail for Windows with a Xenix email backend and address book, since MS was already using Xenix before MS Mail for PC Networks existed.

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 contained a one postoffice-version of MSMail, (which could be upgraded to the full version).

Some more Microsoft email-related history at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Exchange_...

It is a generic way to refer to unix and unix-like systems. It is still in use today, e.g. to indicate Linux as part of the set. For this document most likely it refers to Xenix (MS's unix).

Eunuchs is already a plural word.

As others are saying, the * is meant as a wildcard, not as censorship. It's meant to also cover the likes of Linux or Xenix etc, although there isn't actually any other name that would strictly fit the pattern of "UN*X".

I think trademark, I remember Bill Gates referring to Windows NT as "a better UNIX than UNIX".

OS/2 is likely where that came from - https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/21/successor_to_unix_pla...

That's Plan9 and 9front. I'd say NT it's a better VMS, VMS++ in the alphabet ;), as you get V->W, M->N, S->T, so "WNT".

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