Cheerful Charlie
Contributor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix
I'd forgotten some of it , the OS wars. Thenbst aspect of freemarket comprtition.
I alawys assiciare Unuix with the DEC Vax system, it is was a common system used befor e the PC. In the 80s at Lockheed there were several VAX cluster on the campus. User had terminals in offices. To support the system departments were charged by the CPU second of run time. If you wanted fast numerical processing you had to pay extra to use a hardware math processor. Today the math coprocessor is built into the processor. On the first PCs you had to buy a hardware math accelerator chip that plugged into the motherboard.
The VAX system was not unlike the first IBM pc. It had on open archtecture and companies made plug in boards. Floating Point Systems made a math coprocessor fpr the VAX.
How many here remember Microsoft's Unix for PCs, Xenix? A variety licensed from ATT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
"Microsoft hopes that XENIX will become the preferred choice for software production and exchange", the company stated in 1981.[8] Microsoft referred to its own MS-DOS as its "single-user, single-tasking operating system",[31] and advised customers that wanted multiuser or multitasking support to buy Xenix.[31][32] It planned to over time improve MS-DOS so it would be almost indistinguishable from single-user Xenix, or XEDOS, which would also run on the 68000, Z8000, and LSI-11; they would be upwardly compatible with Xenix, which BYTE in 1983 described as "the multi-user MS-DOS of the future".
Instead, we got Windows.