Hacker News Reader

There was a time Microsoft made a very solid OS. It was called Xenix.

Though I agree about the solid part, I think MS bought rather than made Xenix.

Good point.

In any case, they sold it and it was called Microsoft Xenix.

Yep -- I worked for a (crappy and hopefully defunct) company that used it.

Microsoft bought a license to Version 7 Unix from AT&T. They mixed in some BSD stuff. Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) was originally one of the licensees of Xenix and ended up inheriting it from Microsoft around 1987.

SCO bought Unixware and some licenses for SysV from Novell. They ended up selling all that to a Linux and DOS vendor named Caldera. SCO ended up changing their name to Tarantella.

Caldera changed their name to The SCO Group and under the leadership of Darl McBride, they became one of the most annoying patent trolls ever.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com