Firebird At 20 Years

mAriuZ writes "From Jim Starkey: "September 4th is the 20th anniversary of what is now Firebird. I quit my job at DEC in August, took a three day end-of-summer holiday, and began work on September 4, 1984 in my new career as a software entrepreneur. As best as I can reconstruct, the first two files were cpre.c and cpre.h (C preprocessor), later changed to gpre.c and gpre.h. The files were created on a loaner DEC Pro/350, a PDP-11 personal computer that went exactly nowhere, running XENIX. Gpre was my first C program, XENIX was my first experience with Unix, and the Pro/350 was my very last (but not lamented) experience with PDP-11s.""

Re:Xenix or Venix?

[Liquor]

If I recall correctly, Xenix was indeed produced by Microsoft at the time (the Santa Cruz Organization was to be a 'second source').

But the article mentioned a dislike of Xenix, which I recall as being a fairly well polished product compared to Venix, which had poor manuals (although it did have some real-time extensions), and may have been missing a number of utilities.

The main reason I recall for using Venix over Xenix on the LSI-11/23 type machines was that Xenix was priced to run on the full-blown systems like an 11/44 (competing with RSTS11 or MUMPS at about $5K a copy) while Venix was something like $500.

Then again, I seem to recall that Xenix on the X86 could be bought without any compilers as an almost useless 'run-time' package - I would imagine that using thie would be somewhat annoying.