Xenix Iso

[Eboni Kleifgen]

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I'm finished with both my Linux courses and to fill the emptiness from it, I decided to do a short weekend project. Thanks to OS/2 Museum for the inspiration ( -xenix-two-steps-forward/), which made me look into IBM Xenix 1.0 from the mid 80s. At that time I did not have an 80286 machine, so I never got the opportunity to get acquainted with it.

I find it interesting to read about the development of software products from the 80s, and it is always educating to play with the software in order to understand the roots of the tools we still use today.

There is a kind of elegance and simplicity that I (sort of) miss in today's tooling. In this case for example, everything, including the Software Development System (SDS) occupies approximately 10 MB. Comparing with a picture for example, that is one (1) image (depending on the camera of course).

I created a 360K virtual floppy, which can be accessed from Xenix. The command dosls lists all the files on the disk. If you want to copy files, there is the doscp command. The device name for the diskette describes the density of the diskette, sectors per track and so on, but you can also use A: to indicate diskette drive 1.

I assemble the code using as. I try to link it for Xenix with ld, but obviously that does not work since I use INT 10h. Linking it with dosld and creating the H10DOS.EXE file works fine. Finally I copy it back to the virtual diskette.

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