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* [TUHS] PC Unix (had been How to Kill a Technical Conference
@ 2021-04-06 15:35 M Douglas McIlroy
  2021-04-06 17:09 ` Clem Cole
  2021-04-06 22:41 ` Dave Horsfall
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 30+ messages in thread
From: M Douglas McIlroy @ 2021-04-06 15:35 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

> I wonder. IBM introduced the IBM PC in August of 1981.
> That was years after a non-memory managed version of
> Unix was created by Heinze Lycklama,  LSX. Is anyone
> on this list familiar with Bell Labs management thoughts
> on  selling IBM on LSX rather than "dos"?

IBM famously failed to buy the well-established CP/M in
1980. (CP/M had been introduced in 1974, before the
advent of the LSI-11 on which LSX ran.) By then IBM had
settled on Basic and Intel.  I do not believe they ever
considered Unix and DEC, nor that AT&T considered
selling to IBM. (AT&T had--fortunately--long since been
rebuffed in an attempt to sell to DEC.)

Doug

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 30+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] PC Unix (had been How to Kill a Technical Conference
@ 2021-04-07  0:59 Jason Stevens
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 30+ messages in thread
From: Jason Stevens @ 2021-04-07  0:59 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 'Clem Cole ', 'M Douglas McIlroy '
  Cc: 'TUHS main list '

 There is some information and demos of the early 8086/80286 Xenix,
including the IBM rebranded PC Xenix 1.0 on pcjs.org

https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/unix/ibm/xenix/1.0/

And if you have a modern enough browser you can run them from the browser as
well!

It's amazing that CPU's are fast enough to run interpreted emulation that is
faster than the old machines of the day.

-----Original Message-----
From: Clem Cole
To: M Douglas McIlroy
Cc: TUHS main list
Sent: 4/7/21 1:09 AM
Subject: Re: [TUHS] PC Unix (had been How to Kill a Technical Conference

Doug -- IIRC IBM private-labeled a Microsoft put out a version of Xenix,
although I think it required an PC/AT (286)
 
<https://mailfoogae.appspot.com/t?sender=aY2xlbWNAY2NjLmNvbQ%3D%3D&type=
zerocontent&guid=6f435ae6-0f2c-4fbd-bfe2-adcbf3edac32> ?

On Tue, Apr 6, 2021 at 11:36 AM M Douglas McIlroy <
m.douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu <mailto:m.douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu>
> wrote:


> I wonder. IBM introduced the IBM PC in August of 1981.
> That was years after a non-memory managed version of
> Unix was created by Heinze Lycklama,  LSX. Is anyone
> on this list familiar with Bell Labs management thoughts
> on  selling IBM on LSX rather than "dos"?

IBM famously failed to buy the well-established CP/M in
1980. (CP/M had been introduced in 1974, before the
advent of the LSI-11 on which LSX ran.) By then IBM had
settled on Basic and Intel.  I do not believe they ever
considered Unix and DEC, nor that AT&T considered
selling to IBM. (AT&T had--fortunately--long since been
rebuffed in an attempt to sell to DEC.)

Doug



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 30+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] PC Unix (had been How to Kill a Technical Conference
@ 2021-04-10 18:12 Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 30+ messages in thread
From: Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS @ 2021-04-10 18:12 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

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> On Fri, Apr 9, 2021 at 11:34 PM Ed Bradford <egbegb2 at gmail.com <https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tuhs>> wrote:
> 
> > Why did a Ph.D., an academic, and a computer scientist not know about UNIX
> > in 1974 or so? 1976? In 1976, some (many?) universities had source code.
> >
> 
> Some knowns/givens at the time ...
> 1.) He was a language/compiler type person -- he had created PL/M and that
> was really what he was originally trying to show off.  As I understand it
> and has been reported in other interviews, originally CP/M was an attempt
> to show off what you could do with PL/M.
> 2.) The 8080/Z80 S-100 style machines we quite limited, they had very
> little memory, no MMU, and extremely limited storage in the 8" floppies
> 3.) He was familiar with RT/11 and DOS-11, many Universities had it on
> smaller PDP-11s as they ran on an 11/20 without an MMU also with limited
> memory, and often used simple (primarily tape) storage (DECtape and
> Cassette's) as the default 'laboratory' system, replacing the earlier PDP-8
> for the same job which primarily ran DOS-8 in those settings.
> 4.) Fifth and Sixth Edition of Unix was $150 for university but to run it,
> it took a larger at least 11/40 or 45, with a minimum of 64Kbytes to boot
> and really need the full 256Kbytes to run acceptably and the cost of a 2.5M
> byte RK05 disk was much greater per byte than tape -- thus the base system
> it took to run it was at least $60K (in 1975 dollars) and typically cost
> about two to four times that in practice.   Remember the cost of
> acquisition of the HW dominated many (most) choices.
> 
> *I**'ll take a guess, but it is only that.*  I *suspect* he saw the S-100
> system as closer to a PDP-11/20 'lab' system than as a small
> timesharing machine.  He set out with CP/M to duplication the functionality
> from RT/11.  He even the naming of the commands was the same as what DEC
> used (*e.g.* PIP) and used the basic DEC style command syntax and parsing
> rules.

That is about it. CP/M predates the Altair / S-100 bus, and was designed for a heavily hacked Intellec-8 system.

CP/M was developed on a PDP-10 based 8080 simulator in 1974. It was developed for the dual purposes of creating a “native” PL/M compiler and to create the “astrology machine”.

The first versions of CP/M were written (mostly) in PL/M. To some extent, in 1974 both Unix and CP/M were research systems, with a kernel coded in a portable language — but aimed at very different levels of hardware capability.

In 1975 customers started to show up and paid serious money for CP/M (Omron, IMSAI) - from that point on the course for Kildall / DRI was set.

The story is here: https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-his-own-words-gary-kildall/?key=in-his-own-words-gary-kildall <https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-his-own-words-gary-kildall/?key=in-his-own-words-gary-kildall>



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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 30+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2021-04-10 18:13 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 30+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2021-04-06 15:35 [TUHS] PC Unix (had been How to Kill a Technical Conference M Douglas McIlroy
2021-04-06 17:09 ` Clem Cole
2021-04-06 17:32   ` Charles H Sauer
2021-04-06 20:11     ` Josh Good
2021-04-06 20:26       ` Jim Capp
2021-04-06 20:47         ` Charles H Sauer
2021-04-07 16:42           ` Josh Good
2021-04-07 18:04             ` Charles H. Sauer
2021-04-07  2:49         ` Dave Horsfall
2021-04-07  6:04         ` arnold
2021-04-07 16:01           ` heinz
2021-04-06 21:06       ` Clem Cole
2021-04-07  0:58     ` heinz
2021-04-07  1:37       ` Warner Losh
2021-04-07  3:38         ` Dave Horsfall
2021-04-07  2:30     ` Ed Bradford
2021-04-07  2:44       ` Charles H. Sauer
2021-04-06 20:20   ` Boyd Lynn Gerber
2021-04-06 22:41 ` Dave Horsfall
2021-04-07  1:10   ` Jon Steinhart
2021-04-07  1:47     ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2021-04-07  1:49       ` Jon Steinhart
2021-04-07  1:58         ` Larry McVoy
2021-04-07  2:31           ` Serge Burjak
2021-04-09 21:24   ` Michael Parson
2021-04-10  3:33     ` Ed Bradford
2021-04-10 15:12       ` Clem Cole
2021-04-10 15:41         ` Larry McVoy
2021-04-07  0:59 Jason Stevens
2021-04-10 18:12 Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS

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