XEDOS - Microsoft's forgotten Linux-like OS from 1981 revealed!
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ธ.ค. 2020
- Linus Torvalds' Linux brought the power of UNIX to desktop PCs in 1991 -- but it turns out, Microsoft wanted to do the same thing a decade earlier, with XEDOS, a planned operating system for the IBM PC which never materialized... or did it?
This video is part of the DOScember collaboration.
#doscember official playlist:
bit.ly/DOScember2020 - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
Aside from the user interface differences you demonstrated, there was a distinct *nix flavor to the API (i.e programming interface -- using INT 21h) from the CP/M style interface in DOS 1.x. For example, rather than setting up file-control blocks to access with files (this was CP/M style), a new "handle" based system (Unix style) was introduced in DOS 2.x, and this feature was retained in subsequent versions of DOS.
Although the ability to change the switch command was dropped for the command shell, the ability to use slash instead of backslash for directory separator IS still available. Where this became important was in the C language -- where backslash has a special meaning (it is an "escape" character that denotes a special sequence to define special characters -- for example
\t would represent "carriage return", "newline" and "tab", and \007 would be the ASCII BEL character). To encode a backslash you needed to double it -- so you needed to enter \\ to represent \. Where this makes a *royal mess* was if you needed to access a directory hierarchy -- you'd have to have a separate C program for DOS and UNIX. Fortunately it turns out that within a program you can use "/" for the directory separator (in batch files and CONFIG.SYS you still needed t use backslash however as the forward slash was still the option switch character).
I was definitely curious about that 'syscall compatibility' in XeDOS. I wonder of it was just stuff like having a concept of file handles, or if there was a plan for more complete binary compatibility with syscalls having identical syscall numbers and such.
Y’know, I’ve always wondered about that (with the forward slash in DOS and Windows). I knew forward slashes worked but never understood why, since the system would always return paths with backslashes. So this is actually a _feature_ (not _originally_ a compatibility layer) going as far back as DOS 2.0? Cool.
As a (mostly) UNIX guy who sometimes had to port his code to MS-DOS, I really appreciated that feature. Made my life a whole lot easier.
*ARE YOU TELLING ME THAT MICROSOFT HAD THE OPTION OF USING SLASHES IN FILE PATHS AND CHOSE NOT TO TAKE IT AND NOW IT'S 2020 AND WE'RE STILL STUCK WITH BACKSLASHES IN WINDOWS PATHS*
True... Sadge
Yup, that's what he's telling you. And now you know the real reason why DOS/Windows actually accept slash as a directory delimiter. Not because of "compatibility", but because at one point it was a first-class option for how to represent these things. Or it was intended to be. It just never caught on and was removed silently.
Probably because if you noticed that Norton Chronicles article, and if you ask around … people STILL DO NOT KNOW that / is slash and \ is backslash. They gave up on it because people were getting confused.
Although it may be harder to type due to location on keyboard, backslash looks cooler.
@@knghtbrd you're joking right
It's 2020 and people still don't know which one is the backslash
@@knghtbrd "now you know the real reason" -you're not really saying it actually! Microsoft sabotaged the entire computer industry to be incompatible and therefore gain and maintain their monopoly (more exactly; its monopoly-like economic powers in the x86 market.) Maybe a conspiracy theory, but it explains things better than "it just never caught on".
I was part of a team that made an MS-DOS reverse-engineered clone back in 1987. Since no one in the team knew UNIX, we all wondered WT actual F were they thinking when they made these AVAILDEV and SWITCHAR commands and why were they discontinued. A couple of years later I learned UNIX and had the "a-ha" moment.
Damn they really kept Unix away from common programmers back then huh
Forward slashes in MS-DOS...for a brief moment of time, everything was right in the world 😁
Still use it in CMD prompt lol.
Thats how i defrag drives.
backward slashes were a mistake because of escape sequences require typing extra \ character
Microsoft - Slash............ the movie...........soundtrack by............... 😃😁
@@ishdx9374
That's not a big deal. Just type \\ of you intend for a \.
@@louistournas120 that's what I said
I just stumbled into this and it made me almost cry... I started with computers in 1987 as an exchange student at Brown University, literally saving money from my food and housing allowances to buy my first "IBM compatible" with EGA graphics. And digging into all this with MS Microassembler and DOS commands. And suddenly I hear the sounds of the old 360k drives, chirping and humming, listen to the PC's internal workload... And then all the pictures came to my mind, friends in RI, times over there, me, being young and full of expectations and power. And an era of a rising new technology and being part of it. This video is not just tech history, you touched some of my most hidden emotions and memories, thank you so much.
5:33 Remember that DOS carried over the CP/M convention of simply typing a drive letter followed by a colon, with nothing else on the command line, to change the default drive. When the Unix-style “cd” command was introduced for changing the default directory, this interacted with the default-drive-changing function in a surprising way. For example, if your default drive was A:, and you typed “cd B:/test”, this did *not* change the default drive to B: and the directory to /test; instead, it changed the default directory *on drive B:* to /test. It left you in the same default directory you were already in on drive A:. So if you then typed
B:
to change default drive to B:, *now* you would also find yourself in /test as the default directory.
And the Windows command prompt still works that way today!
@@vwestlife Backward compatibility whenever possible! (Unless it costs too much, breaks our new whiz-bang feature... or we just feel like it. 😉)
Yes, each drive in DOS, OS/2 & Windows has its own "current working directory" (CWD). This is convenient for some things (mostly copying files at the DOS prompt) but also super confusing for anyone not expecting it, including UNIX programmers where the user only has a single CWD (as reported by the getcwd command).
And mixing in UNC paths doesn't help either. It's annoying CMD doesn't let you cd to a network share without mapping it to a letter first. Reading through an old version of the Win32 API documentation it would appear there is only one current directory per process. This would imply that the whole funny idea of one current directory per drive is nowadays just emulated in CMD (the WinNT command prompt) for compatibility.
If the actually _is_ still one current directory per drive internally I'd like to hear more about it.
@@eDoc2020 That 26-drive-letter limit has become a millstone around Windows’ neck.
This is incredible! I knew of Xenix and how Microsoft originally thought that was the future OS for microcomputers, but I had no idea that XEDOS was a thing or that it was incorporated into MS-DOS 2.0. It would have been cool if you could still use these features in later versions of MS-DOS. Thanks for sharing!
Oh those floppy disc sounds ..sounds so familiar and I did already forgot that sound.
10:15 Gotta love how the backslash got escaped each time the author tried to use it!
Xenix still is around. Sco licensed it and it was renamed Sco Unixware. Sco licensed Bell Labs Unix Sys V R V and updated it in the late 1980s and still runs on flight computers on 747s. Xenix took off on McDonalds kiosks and Sco made it a terminal OS for fast food and other retail in the 1980s and 90s. In the 2000s some restaurants still used it
Windows 10 X64 Version 2004 has Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.0 (WSL 2.0).
SCO was a living nightmare.
No. Xenix became SCO Openserver. Unixware came from USL Unix. Later some Xenix extensions were rewritten into Unixware.
XEDOS sounds like the antagonist AI of a science fiction story
You mean it sounds similar to GLADOS.
@@Superphilipp yeah it does, I actually meant to reference that and forgot
@@Superphilipp sounds like Xenu, who is some sort of deity in Scientology. Referencing a 2007 game on a DOSember post just seems wrong.
pretty close to ZARDOZ
Back in the day when things like directories and streams were luxuries.
It was a limitation that early MacOS actually shared. Any folders you created on old MFS-formatted floppies were just mirages created by the Finder, and weren't present in any other program (like the file-open dialogue boxes)
This is cool. I had no idea about the Xenix "heritage" of DOS 2.0!
Now that I do know, I'm kinda sad they removed it.
Anyway, great video - cheers.
Part of the reason could be that, in 1988, Dave Cutler left DEC to join Microsoft. He was the architect of Windows NT. And DEC had a tradition of being Unix haters. If you know anything about their flagship 32-bit VAX/VMS OS, you will notice similarities in the design of Windows NT.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 DOS 3 was released in 1984 though, predating Mr. Cutler's arrival by 4 years, and those Xenix features were gone by then. The reason MS dropped Xenix probably has more to do with AT&T starting to sell UNIX System V, and MS subsequently selling Xenix to SCO in 1987. I'm more inclined to think hiring Mr. Cutler was a reaction to dropping Xenix, not a cause.
Microsoft still sold it via Sco resellers for companies like Mcdonald's. The price in 1981 was $1500 in 1981 dollars! Dos was $50 so it made sense to use that OS instead
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 ... and if you go up each letter from VMS you get WNT... Windows NT 😉
They didn't want 'switchar' to be used because it was not fully implemented. Under MS-DOS each executable command is responsible for parsing its own arguments and not all of them implemented the functionality to look at the operating system for the current switch character and parse their command line appropriately. In other words, trying to do daily activities with the default switchar was consistent, but changing to use the '-' only changed some programs, and you had to remember which was which. It's too bad they didn't provide a standard library like argparse and move the rest of the way to '-' as the default switchar.
Yeah, they should've just copied *nix systems with getopt.
That tandy part reminded of Danooct1
Thanks for sharing this! That's some obscure information of something truly forgotten.
Ahhhh the good old days, where Unix guarded harems....
So, altering MS-DOS 2.x to use ‘-‘ instead of ‘/‘ would be a great prank back in the days... And more interestingly, you can enter ‘dir /w’ to list the content of the ‘w’ directory 😊
Just to add to the confusion, later versions of Microsoft’s command-line C compiler (and I think other development tools as well) switched from using “/” to initiate options to the Unix-style “-” prefix instead.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Actually it's a good thing -- since this makes the interface more uniform across different environments. Where this *really* makes a difference is if you're trying to use automation tools like "make" for building programs. The forward slash in DOS version would essentially *require* you to maintain a separate script just for DOS. I also remembering a fair amount of frustration dealing with the earlier MAKE utility that Microsoft had with their programming products -- it was rather "brain-dead" as it *required* you to specify the target items in a "bottom-up" (i.e. sub-modules first, main program last) order rather than the "top-down" order you'd use in Unix. Microsoft's MAKE was not much better than writing a batch file. Using the make utility that came with Borland's compilers was *much* more comfortable for me since it behaved more like the make utility in Unix.
We're still using Xenix in production at my work. There's really old nms for frame-relay equipment that runs on old 486 PC under Xenix.
That's a bad situation that's actually difficult to get to. I mean, Xenix went out of production at the same time 80486 was launched, so you would have to deliberately use an outdated OS on cutting edge hardware. Do you have a background story? It would be very interesting to hear the reasoning behind that design. :)
@@jeschinstad It was bought together, hw and preinstalled software. It's GDC (General Datacomm) TMS-3000. I've got some photos from around 2010 when I was replacing hdd:
ibb.co/hgG3Z32
ibb.co/dWSP9xw
ibb.co/KhLw47K
ibb.co/r2f3XYK
Why not migrating into qemu-based emulation at least?
@@andreslb151 NMS uses COM-port to communicate with network devices and I wasn't able to pass real com port from host system to qemu guest.
@@KidoKatsuragi oh, i see.
I love this arcane DOS history!
You: "arcane"
Me: (having started with MS-DOS 2.0) 😞
There are a number of other 'unix' like features that where hidden in DOS.
One example is redirection of STDERR so STDOUT and STDERR could be directed to different pipes or files.
Example: some_cmd.exe > normalout.txt 2> errorout.txt
some_cmd.exe 2> errorout.txt | some_other_cmd.exe
Another feature hardly used (may have shown up in Dos 3.0 rather than 2) was conditional commands
some_cmd.exe && some_other_cmd.exe would run some_other_cmd only if some_cmd didn't fail.
some_cmd.exe || some_other_cmd.exe would run some_other_cmd only if some_cmd DID fail.
example in use
dir some_file_name || echo New Data > some_file_name
This would create some_file_name and fill it with "New Data" ONLY if it didn't exist already.
The fact that DOS and NT based operating systems use "\" as the folder separator instead of "/" like on all POSIX API compliant operating systems (a.k.a. all the others used today) has caused me no end of headaches when trying to write programs that are OS agnostic.
that sounds hellish... and for such a stupid reason
This is the MAIN argument I have saying that MS is NOT POSIX compliant. I have others too, but this one is a huge pet peeve of mine and truly where the argument begins.
The thing there is you can still use "/" as a path separator, since DOS, OS/2 & NT support it internally when you use filesystem calls. You just need to replace "/" with "\" when you display pathnames to the user so you don't confuse people who expect to see backslashes. I'm reminded of InfoZip's "unzip" port, where it showed forward slashes in its output, which I always thought looked wrong. But a bigger problem is Windows' use of drive letters, which complicates things. Especially since every drive letter has its own current working directory.
@@zoomosis: The backslash has a special meaning in normal operating systems and it's particularly useful when replacing text. For instance, C:\Program Files (x86) must be written C\:\\Program\ Files\ (x86) on GNU+Linux or Mac. The drive letters are not confusing at all. It's just a default mount point. Mounted filesystems have their own working directories on Mac and GNU+Linux as well. I didn't really understand that point. The use of colon, on the other hand, really is problematic, since it's also a special character in normal systems, which is why you have to terminate it with \: on Mac or GNU+Linux.
@@zoomosis Windows processes just have one current working directory, not one for each drive.
Cmd.exe just emulates this behavior to be compatible with DOS which does have one per drive letter.
Reverberated statements of grandeur ALWAYS get my attention.
A fun fact with Xeninx is that it was sold to a lot of 286 as multiuser system, but at the end it was all just an illusion because the protected mode of the x286 was a total disaster and no one enabled it. You could read everyone passwords by just doing a cat of /dev/ram of any process you want.
Another reason to call the 286 "brain damaged" then. 😏
286 was interim - yet MS and others standardized around it - should have waited for the 386.
From the mid 80s on, until the very late 90s, all Radio Shack corporately owned stores ran Xenix on a 386 in the back room and then Radio Shack dumb terminals for the POS, inventory, time keeping (employ clock in/out) and all other store functions.
The system in the back dialed the home office and uploaded and downloaded every night via a regular land line modem. It also had a tape drive for backups and for installing new system updates and such.
I knew there was some sort of Microsoft UNIX early on but didn't know it was baked into DOS.
Thanks for sharing this interesting bit of IT history.
This brings back many Memories. I miss messing with DOS and all those commands I now don’t remember. I was so excited when Windows was introduced. And in color LOL. THANKS.
The biggest innovations of MS-DOS 2.0 was, by far, the device driver support and subdirectories.
The subdirectories were done in such a hacky way.
When Apple introduced its Hierarchical File System, it redesigned it from scratch. Microsoft simply tacked on extra options to the existing FAT file system. Why? It’s not like older DOS versions could understand subdirectories, so why pretend to have any kind of backward compatibility?
I briefly had a chance to try MS-DOS 1.x on a Canadian Hyperion IBM clone back in the '80s. Interesting! Reminded me of CP/M, the lack of subdirectories didn't help and there may have been a fairly low number for the maximum number of files allowed. I'm trying to recall the capacity of the diskettes on that system. Fortunately it would also run MS-DOS 2.0 at the least.
@@bobblum5973 If memory serves, DOS 1.0 only supported 160 KB single-sided floppies. That was later expanded to 320 KB with DOS 1.1, then 180 KB and 360 KB with DOS 2.0.
@@zoomosis actually it was 320k at first. IIRC they added an extra sector per track to get 360k. I remember buying a Compaq Portable back then, and paid extra to get Compaq MS-DOS 2.11 instead of 2.0 to get the greater capacity.
I imagine Bill Gates finding this video, and thinks to himself with a slight smile: ''Oh, I've completely forgot about this! Incredible what some people dig up after so many years..."
He also would've never imagined that 40 years later conspiracy nuts would accuse him of installing microchips in everyone via a 5G-enhanced coronavirus vaccine :-/
I don't think Bill Gates forgets anything. His middle name might be "Pachyderm"
@@belperite - Have you noticed how Gates smiles and practically begins drooling when the subject of epidemics and vaccinations is brought up in interviews? Most [sane] people would consider this an unhealthy reaction. Perhaps _you_ are the "nut".
Or that time he ripped off the Macintosh
Omg, subtitles. Thank you very much, Kevin
3:42 Available to read online here: archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-11-rescan .
Fascinating. Used DOS and Xenix but the XEDOS story is new to me.
It makes me want to cry when I think of how they could've used the right slash from the start, and if they did, then every major computing environment would by now have compatible naming schemes. The computer I'm using right now is still affected by this decision, and I still type the wrong slashes sometimes because of it.
great work as always.
Good catch to add Xenix into your video. Many people don't know about it either.
Damn, wish DOS had kept that, I was right at home seeing it all done that way.
Imagine actually supporting it: you'd have stuff that didn't work with the Unix mode and stuff that didn't work with the DOS mode. People can't even get line endings right between systems.. imagine one system that supports two opposing standards in one shell.
@@donpalmera oh, I know programs would have a shitty time, with all the hardcoded stuff, but looking at that shell just felt nicer.
@lass kinn windows is a mess. It's the only system that isn't utf8 from what I remember.. but still most portable development tools, libraries etc have handling for the differing path formats. People still manage to get it wrong though. Imagine adding a user switch to the path format on top of that.
@@tarstarkusz yep
@@donpalmera To be fair, Windows NT with its native Unicode support was designed before UTF-8 even existed. Back then, the Unicode Consortium were leading everyone to believe that Unicode was a fixed-length 16-bit code and would always stay that way.
Then they changed their mind with Unicode 2.0 (I think it was) and decided we needed room for a lot more characters. By this time we had Windows NT, Sun’s Java language, and also Apple’s HFS+ filesystem, that were built very fundamentally around the assumption of fixed-length 16-bit Unicode characters, aka “UCS-2”. So “UCS-2” was re-dubbed “UTF-16”, with those “surrogate” code points allocated for representing extra characters beyond the 16-bit range. And what was supposed to be a fixed-length code now became variable-length.
By comparison, Linux actually ignored the issue up to that point. And when UTF-8 was devised, they simply adopted that, with minimal fuss. Actually there is nothing in the kernel that assumes anything about UTF-8, or any other encoding, other than that what looks like an ASCII “/” is a path separator, and what looks like an ASCII NUL is a path terminator. That’s it. You can use any other byte values in a pathname, and the kernel doesn’t care. For example, I can use the “∕” character, which looks like “/” but is not treated as such by the kernel, in my filenames, and the kernel will not mistake it for a path separator.
10:12 Rumor has it that the Norton Chronicles typesetters are still trying to find out how to insert a reverse slash \ inside parentheses () in their system...
I feel like Windows would have been way more solid if it kept its Xenix underpinnings.
Definitely. Look at x windows, even early versions are pretty reliable especially when compared to windows. Imagine how much better windows would have been it didn't blue screen of death all the time lol
Windows NT started out on a more robust base. But even that was compromised to create Windows XP and its successors.
Yeah it would be a different world today if Windows 3.1 had been based on Xenix instead of DOS. However MS had a huge dis-incentive to do that because it would have been impossible to run DOS programs on it, and at the time DOS ran the PC world.
@@travis1240 OS/2 could run DOS apps quite well in the end (better than Windows NT ever did), so it's not a stretch to think someone at Microsoft could've built a good DOS compatibility box for Xenix if they went in that direction.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 it's more complicated than that. The reason MS went away from Xenix is IBM was working on a successor called OS/2. MS wrote it with IBM and a fall out happened in the late 1980s where Compaq made the 1st server grade PC Pro with 2 CPUs and scsi disks intended as a server (new thing). IBM wanted OS/2 to be locked to IBM systems and Novel Netware and Bryan Vines made operating systems for the Compaq Pro. HP and Dell started following suite with these new devices called servers that would replace mini computers. With Xenix already dead MS ripped off their OS/2 code and made Windows NT. The rest is history. If it weren't for IBM then MS would have used Xenix with a gui on top in that alternate universe
This was super interesting.
Thanks Kevin. Way back in '86 I started with MS-Dos 2.1 and you just blew my mind with your legerdemain!. Even when DOS 3.2 came out, I liked 2.1 better. You are a true historian.
Thanks for the content!
The drive sound of a Tandy 1000- I haven't heard that since 1990.
We bought a Tandy 1000 from a divorce sale for few hundred dollars, it was only 3 month old. My wife and kids just loved the Tandy 1000 it even had extra memory we loaded games into a ram drive and played space quest with no disk load time, once we loaded the disks. But we played those games all day and late into the night. Everyone taking their turn while everyone else watched. What a wonderful time. Our kids still talk about those time and that’s the only computer they call by name Tandy 1000. The rest are all the red computer the colter we played myst on .
7:35 that TIME example made me LOL. Great!
Subtitles again, thank you ^^
Awesome videoman, I clicked right away on it as soon as I saw it :3
Awesome video, man*
I just saw the wrong words, but I can't edit it cuz I will loose your heart if I do it :(
Thanks for the video! Very interesting! 👍😊
Fascinating. I loved DOS. It did what you told it and didn’t ask you stupid questions. I still pop out to the command line on a regular basis.
Great video! I remember hearing about something akin to XEDOS way back in the day, but never heard that specific name. I do remember that their long-term plan was to move to Xenix for high-end systems. Of course, this was before they had started collaborating with IBM on what became OS/2. Xenix was a nice UNIX variant, and was the first version of UNIX I ever got to spend time on. Having DOS essentially morph into that would've been nice, but unfortunately that's not how things worked out.
Great video! 👍🏻
Very interesting i never heard of this before thanks for the video.
Super interesting video, who have thought that after all these years I'd still be able to learn something new about DOS.
And I thought I knew everything about DOS. VWestlife ROCKS!
Am I the only one noticing that that Norton article used around 10:06 seems to have had an escaping problem?
Presumably it was typeset using something that uses C style \ escapes, and it took "(\)" to mean "()" :P
They also wrote backslash instead of slash.
What a fascinating quirk of computer history. My first computer was a Tandy 1000 with MS-DOS 2.11 and I had no idea this was a thing.
This is awesome and fascinating, thanks for the video
I read the title as Microsoft Xvideos. Nedless to say, i was hooked on immediately.
Thank you for this!
it brings me up my childhood memories.
good old times.
I worked on Xenix machines. They were monolithically far beyond DOS in terms of stability but not exactly easy to write apps for and hardware at the time (typically PDP boxes) not up to the task other than POS back ends, etc. Think OS/2, but far worse in terms of performance and required specific hardware. Unix on a desktop (XeDOS)might sound cool, but in a tech market where you wanted to push the app market and a PC on every desktop it didn't solve any problems. XeDOS was really a conceptual attempt to get hardware and code compliance. Good luck with that in the 80s.Gates was smart enough to let quick to market DOS apps drive the industry while simultaneously playing IBM while endorsing the clone market. XeDOS was a dead end and Microsoft eventually let Xenix wither.
Xenix could’ve succeeded if it cost the same price as MS-DOS and was similarly bundled. What could DOS do that Xenix couldn’t? Other than be easily cloned
"a machine on every desktop" sounds just crazy, since we all know "there is a world market for maybe five computers."
I forgot for a moment that "desktop" has another meaning than "desktop computer" and was really confused for a while...
To be fair the head of IBM was referring to the absolutely massive pre mainframe computers (ENIAC and it's immediate successors)
Still, he was ridiculously wrong on just about every level. Bit like the head of the patent office in the late 1800's who advised congress that they may as well shut the patent office down as everything useful had already been invented.
1982 was the year without Internet and MS-DOS was the new thing. Apple also did the Apple II and Apple IIe are the basic computer system where it does the same as the MS-DOS, but it came with a floppy disk drive. I used to play around with the Apple IIe when I was in school and it was fun. I played “Pick-A-Dilly Pair”, “Oregon Trail”, “Wheel of Fortune”, and other games for the Apple IIe.
There was another computer which is quite rare is the Mattel Electronics Aquarius computer which was released in 1983 and it was a huge flop, but you get other features like the basic program like Microsoft did, plus add-ons along with the game like “Snafu” which was a port of the Intellivision game, and a few other games. I remember since I was a kid when Mattel’s Aquarius was the first computer we had at the time, and it was fun. The Aquarius had a data cassette recorder, and a printer. As for the name itself, it has nothing to do with the song by the 5th Dimension.
I was in a lab at the time being a sysadmin for V7 unix and BSD Unix on pdp/11s. We used the MKS toolkit (and switchar) on ibm pc clones, which allowed us to go back and forth easily on the respective command lines. But then Gates saw a Macintosh, decided to commit to Windows, and the moment passed. Luckily, there was BSDI Unix, and later FreeBSD, etc. I personally never saw the need for Linux, but when OSX came out, we all moved to that, and are still there.
I knew about switchar, and attempts to make MS-DOS more UNIX like, but didn't know there was a roadmap. Interesting.
Thanks for the awesome video. Never heard the term "XEDOS," and interesting that it was an idea before release of Venix and PC/IX.
I could use DOS 2.0's switchar command; I'm typing the wrong thing all through #DOScember. :)
Had only heard of XENIX from the TRS-80 days - thanks for posting!
not even SCO Xenix ?
How confusing will it be in another 65-years when someone gets a hold of this computer to re-create this video, creating files and directories in 2085 ;)
everyone that operated PCs in the 80s must be so relieved that instead of having to memorize commands all you do nowadays is click a search bar and type out what you want.
I have worked with xenix on a Tandy model 16
Is... Is that a Mac behind Bill at the end? 😃
@HoboWild Exactly! I'm just amused anytime I'm reminded of the old days before it got weird between MSoft and Apple.
There's also one peeking behind him around 0:28!
Microsoft was a big supplier of software for the Macintosh when it was released. There was also a port of XENIX to the Apple Lisa as well.
Microsoft invested in Apple way back, as Jobs pointed out to Gates that even Microsoft needed a competitor
MS even made Apple hardware for a while!
10:04 Man, I haven't seen prompt $p$g in so long, I had completely forgotten about it
13:00 Funny how he has a Mac SE(/30?) behind him.
Why is it funny? Microsoft has always developed and sold software for macs.
@@PaulSpades
True. He just had a massive (and IMHO questionable) superiority complex about his own products.
It's kind of odd to realize that the two companies who most shaped technology in the 80s through the naughties were both really big jerks.
Bill turned out allright, though, I guess. I wonder what Steve would be like if he were still around.
XENIX was Microsoft's first OS product, which they licenced from AT&T back in the late 1970s. It initially didn't run on x86 platforms; the first version was designed for the PDP-11 and it was later ported to 68k and ZiLOG's Z8000 architecture. It didn't see an official x86 version until SCO acquired the rights in 1987.
Great video. I'd say I never heard of this, but the Like icon is black and scrolling down, I see I left a comment 2 years ago. Nice to see that my memory is so great. Speaking of which, great video.
I wonder why they removed the switchvar and that other option in MD-DOS 3.0. BTW, great video.
Linus would've been happy about a readily available and affordable UNIX-like operating system for the 386 because the lack of one was the reason he started the Linux kernel project. Stallman wouldn't have cared about anything from Microsoft at the time anyways because he was after a free software implementation of UNIX-like operating system and XEDOS wouldn't have been one.
Richard Stallman has always been a mentally ill freak.
Fascinating!
Very interesting, thanks for sharing that. Microsoft's approach was to augment their existing OS which makes sense from a business standpoint though will prevent disruptive change sometimes needed to create something really unique. Linus started from scratch and focused on the core of the kernel, which went beyond adding piping support. There were other companies also trying to bring the power of Unix to the micro-computer. We may not think of it today, but Unix was no a practical OS for the smaller platform because it required more resources than micro's could provide. In the early 80's Microsoft had meetings with Sinclair Research and wanted to provide and OS for their product line but Sinclair refused and designed their own (initially dubbed DomeOS). There's a nice set of notes published by the author of Sinclair's "workable Unix" OS, which eventually was called QDOS, that highlights their plan. That OS actually did resemble a Linux-like kernel in 1983 and at its core behaved a lot like many modern OS's do today...though it was not file-based, which seemed to be a pet peeve of Linus who really wanted the full Unix experience. I don't think file-based in the early 1980's was that practical for micro computers. Linus actually used that system at a younger age, though before he became interested in OS development, so it likely had little impact, but neat to see his orbit cross that orbit when he eventually went on to build Linux. Interesting tidbit in history.
Amazing! Never heard about this before.
I'm glad you demonstrated More's Law.
I used some Unix OS's on IBM PCs in the late 1980's. ScoUnix and another that slips my mind.
Also, I found a bug in DOS 2 ... not sure what subversion ... on my first day using an IBM PC XT back in 1984. I had a 5.25 inch floppy boot disk with a couple of games on it (one was Spacewar ... a classic DOS game), and some other files. And I was typing commands to delete unwanted files, and move some files back to the root dir, and I typed rmdir to remove a subdirectory, but the subdirectory still had files in it. This corrupted the disk and made the disk unusable - iirc, no files would load from it. Had to reformat the disk and and re-copy. The good old days ...
SCO - Xenix was also called SystemV (five)
We used it in 1993 as a multi-tasking
small 5 termimal system for messenger delivery system
for billing, ticket generation, and Database.
“System V” was AT&T’s name for the most popular version of its official Unix system. Vendor Unixes were also commonly classified as being derivatives of System V as opposed to, say, BSD.
OH YES! That would make using DOS *SOOOO* much better for me, but I bet it messes things up in software. I always feel dumb and type / for directories and - for switches whenever i'm forced to use a DOS-like system
When will CP/M have it's month?
Hopefully there will be #CPMarch.
*its
CP/March!
Oh yes, please!
@@Zankuho given the usual implications the internet has given to "CP" I am very, very wary of CP/March.
@@vwestlife That would be cool!
amazing! Greetings from Argentina!
No, it's not GNU/Linux. Only a small subset of the code in a typical Linux distribution is from the GNU project. The whole "GNU/Linux" things was Richard Stallman throwing a hissy fit because his kernel was a disaster.
great video. it would have been great to keep some of this stuff. as others have mentioned Windows still does support either back-slash or forward-slash for path separators.
I spent the past 2 weeks building and installing the system i had in late 80's/early 90's, with Dos, Windows 3.1, Turbo Pascal 3+4, getting my hands on an Vesa Local Bus board and a Promise 4030-vl cache controller.
In some ways it runst both faster and more reliable than most W10 systems :o) A real pleasure to work with, as well as a massive dose of nostalgia!
Happy "DOScember"?
Comparing DOS to Linux I don't get just because they added directories and pipes. You may also not remember that PC-DOS and MS-DOS are based on IBM DOS/360 from 1965ish. The CP/M clone Microsoft bought to make PC-DOS was itself based on the commands from GCOS from 1962 which itself is quite similar to DOS/360. In summary, Microsoft has been really good at hypnotizing people into forgetting who did what when.
I love this - best #DOScember video, imo. i can't wait to see what you do for #JanuAtari, #Appleril and #JuneCommodore.
And #CPMarch for CP/M!
@@vwestlife I like it!
MSDOS 2 on a Tandy is the first computer I owned. And, tat machine did run a Linux/Unix OS before it was scrapped as well as OS2/Warp. At work I used a Xenix 386 machine
Your example of a time in text piping into the real time clock was something we used.
We had one server in the main branch and we corrected the time whenever we needed to but we also had servers on different branches. (way before internet) And every night we phoned in to each branch and copied needed files over.
I piped the time into one text file, copied it to all branches and there it was piped into the server clock.
There was a delay of some minutes but that was acceptable.
10:44 You can actually create those reserved filenames on later DOS versions via a trick using undelete. For instance, create a file named KON, then delete it, then undelete it, whereupon it will prompt for the first character. In this case, you could give it a C so that it will now be named CON. You’ll need to make use of wildcards to get rid of such files, e.g. DEL ?ON
And you can do other confusing tricks such as using ASCII 255 to add what looks like a space to a file name, but actually isn't.
@@vwestlife Actually I made a video detailing several ways to make filenames with true spaces (ASCII 32 decimal) from within pure MS-DOS.
You can also delete (ok, rename) such files by using chkdsk or scandisk as they consider them invalid file names on the disk itself. At least the chkdsk for FAT on current Windows removes these entries.
@@eDoc2020 As a follow-up to my vid showing how to put ASCII 32 spaces in filenames from pure DOS, I made another vid detailing glitches in Windows 95/98 which allow for duplicate filenames for the 8.3 (short) and long names. This ambiguous state on the disk strangely is not flagged by CHKDSK or SCANDISK as being problematic.
Wow, after so long I finally learn something new about MS-DOS :D
I had heard about the switchar setting but not from official documentation i think it was from microsoft's raymond chen on his the old new thing blog in the last few years. I think that because it only affected msdos commands and not third party software its usefulness was limited. The dev setting would have broken batch files not expecting it so again limited usefulness.
I remember working on a Xenix machine in London years ago. I could see it was like Unix but knew nothing about it. I wonder why it never caught on? Instead we were lumbered with desperately slow Windows NT servers because people like clicking mice apparently.
XENIX never caught on because MS-DOS caught on instead, and pretty much assured that any future operating systems would need to be DOS-compatible.
What I would give to go back to those times. Things were sooooo much simpler back then.
Don't forget Tandy and Concurrent DOS.
@VWestlife - I was shocked that I noticed, when booting an old Audix Voicemail system, that the OS was Zenix Copyright Microsoft Corporation! Thanks for the full back story. Gratitude!
I'd forgotten about those MS-DOS 2.0 options!
Years back I'd discovered the undocumented TRUENAME command in DOS 3.x onward, which shows the actual filename for files redirected or substituted locally or via a network. I later found it mentioned in the book "Voodoo DOS", which was neat because I'd found it on my own.
Another quirk I found was in MS-DOS 4.x, where (if I remember the details) I did a directory command to include hidden and system files. Along with COMx, LPTx and CON devices, I found one called CLOCK$. Apparently it was the time of day clock device. I never did much more with it, and it seems to have gone away with DOS 5.0 and later.
I'm not sure about MS-DOS 4.0 or 5.0 but "MEM /D" in DR DOS 6.0 will give you a list of device drivers, including CLOCK$.
@@zoomosis That's a much better way of displaying it, what I found was more a quirk in how they'd implemented it, since it wasn't there in prior or subsequent versions of DOS when I tried it there.
DR-DOS was actually better than MS-/PC-DOS at the time it came out. More and better features, and it forced Microsoft to add them into their DOS as well. It bothered them enough to hide a check in Windows to display a bogus error if it found you were running it atop DR-DOS instead of theirs.
I never owned a copy of DR-DOS, but a friend did, and we tried it out on different systems. We both thought it was a definite improvement over the then-current version of MS-DOS.
I used to do support for Xenix on Tandy 16B's. Had one system in a power brownout. All the terminals got kicked off followed by the console then the hard disks (2x 15 MB) stayed that way for about a minute then the power started coming backup and it picked everything backup as if nothing had happened.
Grew up on DOS, but never read about this! Thanks..
I guess the original MSDOS didn't have directories / folders? I probably shouldn't be surprised considering other computers at the time didn't have them either. Apple II didn't have them, and neither did commodore until Amiga.
Correct, MS-DOS 1.x was pretty pathetic in terms of its capabilities (or lack thereof). Comparing MS-DOS 1.x to 2.x is like comparing the Apple II's DOS 3.3 to ProDOS.
The Apple 2 **did have** subdirectories (ProDOS, Jan 1983) before Microsoft did (MS-DOS 2.0, March 1983).
Very cool! Great video as always and I learned something! I've never heard of this UNIX based OS from Microsoft! It would have been interesting if this OS was still around! Interesting indeed that it was kept hush hush. There has been talk recently that it's possible that later versions of Windows could be based on Linux. I don't want to upset Richard Stallman so I'll say GNU/Linux in case he reads this.. ☺️ There is now a Linux Sub System that can run under Windows 10 where you can run Ubuntu and other distros. The distros can be installed from the Windows Store. I remember the days where Microsoft called Linux a cancer. Things have really changed and I think that's great since I use both operating systems. I've been using and testing the new Microsoft Edge Browser under Linux and I think it's pretty good.. It seems that since it's based on the open source chromium web browser it's not bad. If you would like to try it the Linux version of Microsoft Edge is available here..
blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2020/10/20/microsoft-edge-dev-linux/
3:05 How was XEDOS the idea of Linux? Linux didn't even have an idea in the first place. It was a terminal emulator that slowly evolved into an operating system kernel and that could then be combined with the GNU tools to form an UNIX-like operating system that wasn't UNIX but that was multi-user from day 1. Xenix however was a true UNIX system, so would have been XEDOS, except that it would have been single user. So XEDOS pretty much would have been everything that Linux never has been (UNIX and single user).