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Xref: sserve comp.unix.bsd:12205 comp.bugs.4bsd:1984 Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!haven.umd.edu!uunet!spcvxb!terry From: terry@spcvxb.spc.edu (Terry Kennedy, Operations Mgr.) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd,comp.bugs.4bsd Subject: Re: 4.4BSD Release Message-ID: <1993Jul6.231111.6506@spcvxb.spc.edu> Date: 6 Jul 93 23:11:10 EDT References: <20qdsj$6rt@agate.berkeley.edu> <ROB.93Jul1201153@gangrene.berkeley.edu> <C9rsE8.8u1@kithrup.com> Organization: St. Peter's College, US Lines: 34 In article <C9rsE8.8u1@kithrup.com>, sef@kithrup.com (Sean Eric Fagan) writes: > Actually, XENIX cannot be called UNIX, which is why, as one might > guess, it is called XENIX instead of UNIX. Same for IRIX, etc. Just > getting a source license and binary distribution license from AT&T/USL > did not give one the right to call the product "UNIX"; I know that > SCO paid for the right to call their product UNIX, and paid pretty > dearly. Yup - this is one of the things that hurt the AT&T/USL/whatever "Unix" effort. For many years, if you were a commercial vendor with lots of money, you could hand some of that money to AT&T (no USL yet) and get the right to sell copies of AT&T's Unix as long as you didn't call it Unix. Thus we had Genix (National Semiconductor), etc. - probably hundreds of assorted *ix (and a few *yx) products from as many vendors. Now, an end-user-style customer with a system running "Fooix" doesn't necessarily associate Fooix with AT&T/USL and any other *ix system. This did a *lot* to fragment the Unix marketplace. In fact, I remember when Microsoft got the rights to what they called Xenix, which at that time ran on a PDP-11 system. This was in 1980 or so. We had a Microsoft Xenix system running on a PDP-11/34 and all the manuals were AT&T/Bell Labs manuals with "Unix" magic-markered out and a sticker on the cover saying something like "All references to AT&T Unix within are actually to Microsoft Xenix, a software product licensed from AT&T". I remember seeing Microsoft delaying Xenix for PC's again and again, and wondering why. When I asked, I was told that they were rewriting large portions of the code. I thought this was pretty bizarre, as I had seen it happily running on an 8086-based Zenith system many months ago. To this day I don't know why Microsoft waited so long to deliver product. Terry Kennedy Operations Manager, Academic Computing terry@spcvxa.bitnet St. Peter's College, Jersey City, NJ USA terry@spcvxa.spc.edu +1 201 915 9381