[TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 02:10:14AM -0600, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> emanuel stiebler <emu at e-bbes.com> wrote:
> 
> > On 2019-07-11 18:50, A. P. Garcia wrote:
> > > On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 12:31 PM Clem cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Did Sun have anything to do with that? I seem to recall something
> > > called "Interactive Unix" for the 386, possibly marketed by Sun...
> >
> > "Interactive Unix" was pretty nice back than.
> > Anybody remembers ESIX? Still have the document wall for that ...
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> 
> Sun had a '386 based system in early 90s-ish called the Road Runner.
> I never saw it. It ran SunOS 4.x and I think was discontinued by the
> time Solaris 2.x came along.

Yep, can confirm.  I was a fan but the powers that were at Sun at the
time just didn't want competition for SPARC.  Which was sort of silly,
a 386 was nowhere near as fast as the SPARC chips of the day, that was
when RISC actually made sense.  But perhaps they had a crystal ball
and could see that x86 was going to be as fast or faster down the
road?  I tend to doubt it, they really looked down on the 386.