[TUHS] First Unix-like OSes not derived from AT&T code?

James Frew frew at ucsb.edu
Wed May 11 02:42:01 AEST 2022


In the early '80s UC Santa Barbara had a general assignment teaching lab 
full of IBM PC/ATs (i.e. 286s). We convinced the the powers-that-be to 
let us run Xenix on them for a remote sensing class, which meant we 
could port an image processing system I'd written under v6 (PDP-11/45) 
to an actual classroom. Xenix must have been v7 or pretty close, since 
the port was painless. (The display driver was a bit harder---it was 
(gasp!) 8-bits deep, first display I didn't have to dither on, but it 
wasn't memory-mapped, so you had to shovel pixels into it a byte a time. 
Made for nice dramatic slow reveals...)

Thanks for the memories!
/James Frew

P.S.: Hardware brevis, software longa: https://github.com/USDA-ARS-NWRC/ipw

On 2022-05-10 09:08, Warner Losh wrote:
>
> Microsoft's Xenix was also in this time frame, but wasn't marketed by 
> IBM (and its earliest version in 1982 predate Venix, but were only for 
> Intel's System 86 machines, and may have required an Intel MMU board 
> (the quick research I did was unclear on this point, other than it was 
> supported).


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