Alpha CPUs, was Re: [rescue] i860 Success

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

On Mon, 3 May 2004, Phil Stracchino wrote:

>
> On Mon, May 03, 2004 at 06:55:25PM -0700, Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez wrote:
> > .... for Xenix, coherent or even sequent which were x86 based nixes.
>
> ...though Coherent was a pretty crippled *nix.  iirc, the Coherent
> kernel could address only a single 64k memory segment.
>
> Then again, Thompson & Ritchie's original Unix machine at Bell Labs only
> had 64k ....

I believe that the first 2 releases of Unix were single user (dunno if
they were single tasked though).

I think there were some Xenix or somesuch nix that actually ran on 8086s,
so I assume that it must have been a real pain in the rear to get any sort
of multiprogramming/multiuser going on that system. Wasn't Altos which
sold 8086 based multi user systems?

I think I also remembered some brain dead version of Unix for x86 which
had the 8.3 naming convention/limit (or it may be a brain fart).

And a quick question, was Xenix M$'s first OS? If that is the case, it is
rather messed up that M$ started as an *nix shop of sorts. Ugh..