Re: [TUHS] What happened with XENIX? (was Re: Unix/World Magazines)

[Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org>]

On Wed, 8 Jan 2020, Dave Horsfall wrote:

> I was forced to use Xenix for a contracting job (and hated it, as it was 
> almost-but-not-quite-Unix, and the differences annoyed me).  Wouldn't 
> Linux have arrived at around that time?

OK, I was out by a few years...  That job was some time in the 70/80s, and 
my memory isn't the best these days.

Similarly, I have a Penguin laptop at home for porting purposes, otherwise 
I never use it.  The cycle goes something like: get it working on both 
FreeBSD and the Mac (fairly easy), try it on the Penguin to see what 
they've broken and make the appropriate changes, then back to the Mac and 
the FreeBSD box again; repeat as necessary.  If worse comes to worst, make 
the code conditional upon the architecture (and I hate doing that, because 
it breaks the logical flow of the code).

For the record, I was porting Unify (an early RDBMS, and quite a nice one) 
to a 386...  Those damned memory models drove me crazy!  I preferred the 
small model because it was fast, but some modules were so big I had to use 
the large model which meant modifying the build script in the appropriate 
directory (no "make" in those days), and there were dozens of them.

ObTrivia: I used to use the Unify demonstration to benchmark a machine, 
and used to joke that sometimes I needed a calendar, not a clock :-)

-- Dave