Rex Ballard wrote:
> There is a distinct possibility that when IBM had the discussion about
> an Operating System, and Bill Gates said "We have an operating
> system", IBM may have thought that Bill was talking about Xenix.
> Microsoft had introduced Xenix for the Radio Shack Tandy 6000
> computer. The only problem was that the Tandy computer was based on
> the 68000 processor, not the 8086 or 8088 processor.
>
Actually Xexix originally ran on the Tandy Model IIb. Unfortunately there
were a lot of hardware and software problems with Tandy's Xenix offerings.
The Model 6000 was quite an improvement. It still used a 68000 main
processor and Z80 I/O controller, but the main I/O was on the main board
and the BUS was physically more stable. The Model 6000 also had room to
mount the hard drive internally (originally 5MB). Unfortunately, Xenix was
still very unstable even with matched memory cards and all the recommended
mods to the hardware, of which there were many.
It was probably for good reason that Microsoft didn't offer Xenix for the
original PC. Xenix had a lot of issues and the clunky 8088 processor, with
its stupid memory model to keep it compatible with 8085 code, would have
made Xenix even more unstable. Xenix didn't become all that stable until
the original SCO got it running on the 386 using a flat memory model. As
far as I can remember, the first version of SCO Xenix ran on the 286.
Ian
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