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Xenix was Microsoft's version of UNIX for microprocessors. Microsoft called it Xenix because it could not license the "UNIX" name.

Microsoft purchased a license for UNIX 7th Edition from AT&T in 1979, and announced on August 25, 1980 that it would make it available for the 16-bit microcomputer market. Xenix was not sold directly to end users; Microsoft licensed it to computer manufacturers who then ported it to their systems. The first ports of Xenix were to the Zilog Z8001 16-bit processor.

Altos shipped a version for their computers early in 1982, Tandy Corporation shipped one for their 68000-based systems in January 1983, and Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) released their port to the Intel 8086The 8086 is a 16- bit microprocessor chip designed by Intel in 1978, which gave rise to the x86 architecture. Shortly later the Intel 8088 was introduced with an external 8-bit bus, allowing the use of cheap chipsets. It was based on the design of the 808 processor in September 1983.

Xenix varied from its 7th Edition origins by incorporating elements from BSDBerkeley Software Distribution BSD is the name of the UNIX derivative distributed in the 1970s from the University of California, Berkeley. The name is also used collectively for the modern descendants of these distributions. History AT&T Bell Laboratorie, and soon possessed the most widely installed base of any Unix flavor due to the popularity of the inexpensive x86x86 or Intel 80x86 is the generic name of a microprocessor architecture first developed and manufactured by Intel. The architecture is called x86 because Intel used to give the earliest processors in this family numeric brand names ending in the sequence processor, even though the port created for Tandy computers proved to be more robust.

When Microsoft entered into an agreement with IBM to develop OS/2OS/2 is an operating system created by Microsoft and IBM and later developed by IBM exclusively. The name stands for "Operating System/2", because it was intended as the preferred operating system for IBM's " Personal System/2 ( PS/2)" line of second-gene, it lost interest in promoting Xenix. Microsoft transferred ownership of Xenix to SCO in an agreement that left Microsoft owning 25% of SCO. However, Microsoft continued to use Xenix internally, submitting a patch to support functionality in UNIX to AT&T in 19871987 is a common year starting on Thursday. Events January January 1 Nunavut's capital changes it name to Iqaluit from Frobisher Bay. January 3 Aretha Franklin becomes the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. January 4 An Amtrak train, which trickled down to the code base of both Xenix and SCO UNIX. Microsoft is said to have used Xenix on VAX minicomputers extensively within their company as late as 1992.

SCO released a version of Xenix for the Intel 80286 processor in 1985, and following their port of Xenix to the 386 processor, a 32-bit chip, renamed it SCO UNIX.

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