Microsoft was born at a time when home and commercial computing did not exist. She was one of the companies that created it. Before Windows, before MS-DOS, Microsoft created Xenix, its first operating system, which he abandoned in just 4 or 5 years. Few remember him.
In the late 70s and early 80s, Microsoft was still a small software company, immersed in the transition between academic computing and personal computers.
Most of the computers were located in universities, research centers, military barracks and large multinational companies. And a good part of them, especially academic computers, They used the UNIX operating system, developed by AT&T for machines like the PDP-11, very common in universities and large companies.
This is how Xenix, Microsoft’s first operating system, was born
In 1980, Microsoft decided to bring UNIX to personal computers. that used 16-bit processors, such as the IBM PC
Microsoft purchased the license from AT&T to use the UNIX System V source code, and adapted it to work on the 16-bit microprocessors of the time. Since he did not have the rights to call it UNIX, he baptized it with the name Xenix:
See figure 1.
Xenix was announced on August 25, 1980, and began to reach computers from companies such as Tandy, Altos, SCO, or Intel, starting in 1981 and 1982, as it was developed. Even the Apple Lisa had its version.
Xenix was not sold to the end user, but to computer manufacturers, who installed it on company PCs, so that they could use it in their organizations. Each copy of Xenix was worth between $2,000 and $9,000 at the time., depending on the number of users. That’s between 6,000 and 28,000 euros today…
Xenix was a text-based operating systemspecially trained for multitasking functions and use of office, educational and business software.
For a time, Bill Gates was convinced that it would be the personal computer operating system of the future, according to Rob Ferguson, one of the Xenix programmers, on his blog.
But then AT&T, the creator of UNIX, and at that time a much more powerful company than Microsoft, decided to launch its own commercial version of UNIX System V, and Microsoft believed that it could not compete with it.
He had also been associated with IBM to create IBM OS/2, the successor to MS-DOS, with a graphical interface. A partnership that Microsoft would abandon shortly after, to create Windows.
Microsoft sold Xenix to SCOwhich had made versions of Xenix for some processors, in the mid-80s. SCO continued developing it until 1989.
Xenix was Microsoft’s first operating system but, unlike Linux, it only had a few years of life.. Their licenses were very expensive, and operating systems with a graphical environment were beginning to prevail.
