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Comment by rglovejoy | Hacker News Reader

What caught my eye was that Radio Shack was selling a version of UNIX back in 1983!

From page 5:

"TRS-XENIX is derived from the powerful UNIX operating system developed by Bell Laboratories. UNIX has been extensively field-tested for the past decade and has demonstrated outstanding performance under heavy workloads. The TRS-XENIX "core", or runtime package, includes the modules required to set up and operate a multi-user system. It includes a hard disk initialization routine, a text editor for modifying the parameters of the system, utilities to transfer files from TRSDOS diskettes, RUNCOBOL to support our COBOL software, and full password protection."

One question, though: is this the same XENIX that Microsoft was licensing from AT&T?

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According to Wikipedia, yes.

"Microsoft did not sell Xenix directly to end users; instead, they licensed it to software OEMs such as Intel, Tandy, Altos and SCO, who then ported it to their own proprietary computer architectures."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix

You also had to pay $750.00 just to get Vi and a C compiler!

From my bad memory;

You could run XENIX programs on Windows NT up to NT 3.51

It is very likely there are still traces of XENIX left in Windows 8.

You must be thinking of the POSIX subsystem. NT's design was meant to have several personalities, of which Win32 was one, OS/2 was one, and POSIX was one, supposedly on equal footing. The POSIX subsystem still exists, I believe you can get it by the control panel under "Programs and Features", "Turn Windows features on or off", and when you check the box it directs you to a website to get GNU tools to run on top of it. (This part used to come from a company called Interix, acquired by MS in '99 according to Wikipedia.)

I know one of the ex-Interix guys it was an interesting story.

eskimo.com in Seattle ran on a Model 16 for several years. It was definitely Microsoft Xenix. My brother wrote the multiuser chat system on there, nice piece of software.

hell, Microsoft's internal mail system was Xenix. The last remnants of Xenix weren't removed from Microsoft until the Tide servers came online - ITG ran a xenix machine as a Usenet spool and telnet proxy until 96 or 97.

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