Speed Daemon
Android Expert
What I find interesting is the timing. By 1980 Microsoft had become a major software OEM, selling MS-BASIC to many of the early microcomputer (that's what they were called before "PC" became popular) manufacturers. They could have told IBM that "UNIX was the future" and pushed their Xenix product on IBM instead of purchasing a CP/M clone and "making it work". Who knows how different things would be if Microsoft had stuck with UNIX and used their bargaining power to get AT&T to lower the license fees.Had it not been for Xenix, I wouldn't be the anti-micro$oft, *nix-centric snob I am today. I never thought of Xenix as having anything to do with m$, because what I used was Tandy Xenix [very briefly] and then SCO Xenix. Regardless, I have such fond memories of my Xenix days.
It was no mean feat to adapt UNIX to run on hardware that lacked key functionality that made SYSV UNIX so successful. The 8086 and 68k CPUs that were a big step forward from their 8-bit predecessors were still pretty crude. Although I never used Xenix, my experience with Minix for pre-286 computers was really interesting and educational.
No matter how it's spelled, the only accounts that I've ever seen of the message are apocryphal. Since a "Starship" isn't likely to suffer from a problem that's more common with jet-skis, I think it's safe to say that the "sucking mud" reference was to the phonetics of what you wrote as "Sckmud" and nickdalzell wrote as "Sckmd". In the UNIX world there's a long tradition of novel pronunciations for things that aren't words. AIX is pronounced "aches", HP-UX is "H-pucks", DEC is "deck", fsck is "F-suck", so on and so forth.It's not sckmd, it's sckmud. As I posted earlier
Along the same lines I was just recalling my experiences with OS/2 Warp in another thread, and how I saw the Win-OS/2 directory (WINOS2) and heard it in my mind as "winos two".