And that's it. The communications part only deals the Micnet (a serial-port
based local networking scheme), and UUCP. No mention at all of the words
"Internet" or "TCP/IP", no even in the Index.
Not a total surprise. In 1988, the average home user had probably barely even heard of the internet. Even business users were only concerned with on-site networking, and that was a fairly expensive proposition.
In truth, I fail to see what was the appeal of such a system, for mere
users, when in the same PC you could run rich DOS-based applications like
WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Ventura Publisher and all the PC software from
those years.
Indeed, from the perspective of a home user you didn't really need an expensive UNIX box to do normal household chores. I was more than happy with a Visual 1050 running CP/M (and Wordstar, Multiplan, etc.) well into the late '80s.
I mean, mail without Internet is pretty useless, althouhg I understand it
could be useful for inter-company communications. And yes, it had vi and the
Bourne Shell. But still, it feels very very limited, this Xenix version,
from a user's point of view.
Which might well explain why Xenix failed to gain much ground with normal folks at home. If you used a UNIX at work, sure, you might want to pay the money to have it at home. But why spend the $ for an operating system that didn't have widespread application development?
I'm probably spoiled from Linux having repositories full of packaged free
software, where the user just has to worry about "which is the best of":
email program, text editor, browser, image manipulation program, video
player, etc. I understand this now pretty well, how spoiled are we these
days.
The proliferation of free software is practically unthinkable from the standpoint of a home user 30 years ago.
-Henry