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* [TUHS] PC Unix
@ 2021-04-07  8:20 Paul Ruizendaal
  2021-04-07 18:04 ` John Gilmore
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 8+ messages in thread
From: Paul Ruizendaal @ 2021-04-07  8:20 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

> 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

Besides all the truth or legend around flying and signing NDA’s, I think there were clear economic reasons for ending up with Microsoft’s DOS, and the pre-cursor to that: picking the 8088.

[1] By 1980 there were an estimated 8,000 software packages for CP/M available, many aimed at small business. IBM was targeting that. The availability of source level converters for 8080 code to 8088 code made porting economically feasible for the (cottage) ISV’s. This must have been a strong argument in favour of picking the 8088 for the original PC.

[2] In line with their respective tried and tested business models, Digital Research offered CP/M-86 with a per-copy license structure. Microsoft offered QDOS with a one-off license structure. The latter was economically more attractive to IBM. I don’t think either side expected clones to happen the way they did, although they did probably factor in the appearance of non-compatible work-alikes.

Although some sources suggest that going with the 68000 and/or Unix were considered, it would have left the new machine without an instant base of affordable small business applications. Speed to market was a leading paradigm for the PC's design team.


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 8+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] PC Unix
@ 2021-04-07  7:52 Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
  2021-04-07 15:57 ` heinz
  2021-04-08 22:31 ` Warner Losh
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 8+ messages in thread
From: Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS @ 2021-04-07  7:52 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

> I developed LSX at Bell Labs in Murray Hill NJ in the 1974-1975 
> timeframe.
> An existing C compiler made it possible without too much effort. The 
> UNIX
> source was available to Universities by then. I also developed Mini-UNIX
> for the PDP11/10  (also no memory protection) in the 1976 timeframe.
> This source code was also made available to Universities, but the source
> code for LSX was not.
> 
> Peter Weiner, the founder of INTERACTIVE Systems Corp.(ISC) in June 
> 1977,
> the first commercial company to license UNIX source from Western
> Electric for $20,000. Binary licenses were available at the same time.
> I joined ISC in May of 1978 when ISC was the first company to offer
> UNIX support services to third parties. There was never any talk about
> licensing  UNIX source code from Western Electric (WE) from the founding
> of ISC to when the Intel 8086 micro became available in 1981.
> DEC never really targeted the PC market with the LSI-11 micro,
> and WE never made it easy to license binary copies of the UNIX
> source code, So LSX never really caught on in the commercial market.
> ISC was in the business of porting the UNIX source code to other
> computers, micro to mainframe, as new computer architectures
> were developed.
> 
> Heinz

The Wikipedia page for ISC has the following paragraphs:

"Although observers in the early 1980s expected that IBM would choose Microsoft Xenix or a version from AT&T Corporation as the Unix for its microcomputer, PC/IX was the first Unix implementation for the IBM PC XT available directly from IBM. According to Bob Blake, the PC/IX product manager for IBM, their "primary objective was to make a credible Unix system - [...] not try to 'IBM-ize' the product. PC-IX is System III Unix." PC/IX was not, however, the first Unix port to the XT: Venix/86 preceded PC/IX by about a year, although it was based on the older Version 7 Unix.

The main addition to PC/IX was the INed screen editor from ISC. INed offered multiple windows and context-sensitive help, paragraph justification and margin changes, although it was not a fully fledged word processor. PC/IX omitted the System III FORTRAN compiler and the tar file archiver, and did not add BSD tools like vi or the C shell. One reason for not porting these was that in PC/IX, individual applications were limited to a single segment of 64 kB of RAM.

To achieve good filesystem performance, PC/IX addressed the XT hard drive directly, rather than doing this through the BIOS, which gave it a significant speed advantage compared to MS-DOS. Because of the lack of true memory protection in the 8088 chips, IBM only sold single-user licenses for PC/IX.

The PC/IX distribution came on 19 floppy disks and was accompanied by a 1,800-page manual. Installed, PC/IX took approximately 4.5 MB of disk space. An editorial by Bill Machrone in PC Magazine at the time of PC/IX's launch flagged the $900 price as a show stopper given its lack of compatibility with MS-DOS applications. PC/IX was not a commercial success although BYTE in August 1984 described it as "a complete, usable single-user implementation that does what can be done with the 8088", noting that PC/IX on the PC outperformed Venix on the PDP-11/23.”

It seems like Venix/86 came out in Spring 1983 and PC/IX in Spring 1984. I guess by then RAM had become cheap enough that running in 64KB of core was no longer a requirement and LSX and MX did not make sense anymore. Does that sound right?




^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 8+ messages in thread

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Thread overview: 8+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2021-04-07  8:20 [TUHS] PC Unix Paul Ruizendaal
2021-04-07 18:04 ` John Gilmore
2021-04-07 22:18   ` Thomas Paulsen
2021-04-07 22:40     ` Larry McVoy
2021-04-07 23:04       ` Jon Steinhart
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2021-04-07  7:52 Paul Ruizendaal via TUHS
2021-04-07 15:57 ` heinz
2021-04-08 22:31 ` Warner Losh

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