Comment by jmclnx

11 hours ago

>Even a scaled-down version of Unix was too demanding for the 8086 chip”.

Interesting. At my old job I got my hands on Wang IN/ix around 1985, a 16 bit UNIX.

It ran on an 8086 but needed 512k memory. It ran fine. I wonder if memory was the main issue ? But seems the issue was probably memory for IBM and MS

7 comments

jmclnx

Reply
Narishma  8 hours ago

Yes, memory was the main issue. The PC launched with 64KB of RAM. Technically there was a model with 16KB of RAM and no disk drive but I don't think they produced or sold many of those.

  • Stratoscope  4 hours ago

    16KB and no floppy drive. That was my first PC!

    I could get the extra 48KB memory for less than IBM charged. More importantly, double sided floppy drives were already on the market but you couldn't get them from IBM at any price.

    So I went to a local component supplier and got a pair of double sided drives. They worked "out of the box" in DOS, but unsurprisingly, only side 1 of each drive showed up as A: and B: drives.

    So I wrote a TSR to add C: and D: drive letterss which were side 2 of each drive.

    It was super easy.

    Later I heard about a fancier TSR that combined side 1 and 2 of each drive into a single drive letter with twice the capacity.

    But that was a much more complicated task, and I was happy enough with my four-drive-letter solution.

somat  10 hours ago

2BSD is still hanging on getting updates and forked projects to this day. My understanding is that it's longevity in the face of the existence of 4bsd is because it is 16-bit clean, These days it is mainly for people who want a unix for their microcontroller.

Here is one, https://github.com/RetroBSD/retrobsd. This is for the pic32, so I may be wrong about the 16-bit thing.

I don't know if anyone has done it but it looks like it could fit, perhaps not on a original 8086 PC, but perhaps a 286 with 640K.