XENIX expiration date?

[Ronald S H Khoo]

In article <2480 at crash.cts.com> jca at pnet01.cts.com (John C. Archambeau) writes:
> >
>     With respect to SCO Xenix 386, to my knowledge 2.3.3 is the LAST version
>     of 386.

Eh ? Can someone from SCO comment on this please?  I was under the
impression that 2.3.3 is actually OLDER than 2.3.2 being a "branch
version" to bugfix support for VPix or some such abomination.  Was my
impression wrong ?

It's a pity SCO are intending to stop supporting Xenix.  I do realise
that resources are stretched, and all that, and that the market wants a
more generic product, but SCO are going to lose a lot of friends if they
don't at least continue to make minor upgrades to maintain compatibilty
with new basic machines, even if they can't keep supporting new add-on
peripherals, etc.

In fact, stopping DEVELOPMENT of the Xenix product is in many ways a
GOOD THING, because it'll give us a nice stable kernel to work with.
You know, for PRODUCTS that have to go through the front door :-) It's a
shame that the sxt driver will never be fixed to work properly and
include support for select() etc, but I suppose I can live with that.
(Yes, sxt's are useful if you have a job control shell, NOT with shl
though -- :-)

However, stopping support is another thing altogether.  If I can't buy a
Xenix to work on a then-new ISA-based 386 box in 5 years time (and Yes,
I do believe they will exist, look how new XT-type boxes continue to
appear even today) I will indeed feel that SCO would have failed the
small system user.
-- 
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