What Happened to Microsoft Xenix? Why Microsoft Xenix Disappeared

Roughly half of the 500,000 Unix licenses held in 1988 belonged to Xenix developers, according to AT&T. That was Microsoft's own Unix, and within a few years its name was gone. Microsoft announced Xenix in August 1980, licensing the code from AT&T. Tandy, Altos and IBM shipped it, and a three-person firm in Santa Cruz packaged it for PCs. By 1985 Microsoft counted well over 100,000 Xenix systems. Then the company chose OS/2, handed Xenix to SCO, and signed a 1987 contract that paid it a royalty on AT&T's own Intel Unix. In this documentary: 1. Why Microsoft could sell Unix but never call it Unix 2. How every Xenix copy sent a fee back to AT&T 3. Why a 1985 debate inside Microsoft ended in favor of OS/2 4. How Microsoft turned its Xenix lead into a royalty 5. Why Microsoft's own email stayed on Xenix servers until 1996 What remains is Xenix code inside SCO OpenServer and a royalty clause Microsoft defended in 1997. If you once typed a login at a Tandy 16B or an IBM PC AT terminal, tell us what you ran on it in the comments. Subscribe for more careful histories of the systems that lost the office screen. Sources: The Santa Cruz Operation, Form 10-K405 for fiscal 1996 - SEC EDGAR, 1996: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/85... Microsoft Applauds European Commission Decision to Close Santa Cruz Operation Matter - Microsoft, 1997: https://news.microsoft.com/source/1997/11/... The Future of Xenix - Bill Gates, UnixWorld, 1985: https://archive.org/details/Unix_World_Vol... Microsoft's Migration to Microsoft Exchange Server - Microsoft TechNet, archived 2005: https://web.archive.org/web/20050507010335... #Xenix #MicrosoftXenix #SCOXenix #SantaCruzOperation #UnixHistory #MicrosoftHistory #BillGates #ATTUnix #RetroComputing #ComputerHistory #BeforeWindows Disclaimer: The voiceover used in this video was generated using AI.