[rescue] Interactive Unix questions

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Thu, Jan 10, 2008 at 09:25:58AM +0100, Walter Belgers wrote:
> I always thought (but don't know where I got this from - this list?)  
> that Sun had problems porting SunOS to i386 for their 386i system.  
> Eventually, they just bought a UNIX that would run on i386 (i.e.  
> Interactive UNIX) so they could finish SunOS/386i a bit sooner by just  
> porting the missing drivers.

I may be wrong, but the 386i was NOT a PC. It could not run anything
that ran on a PC. DOS was provided in a virtual machine enivronment.
AFAIK the VM was not sophisticated enough to run any protected mode
operating systems, such as Windows, OS/2, and so on.

>From what I understand the 386i was more like a Sun4 computer with
an 80386 (and a few with 80486) processor. It was abandonded
and they later went the other way, they produced a PC with a SPARC
processor (U5/U10) and much later started selling PCs.

Sun wasn't the only company that did that type of thing, Apple
successfuly ported the Macintosh "System" to a '486 processor
system, but I've never read any hardware details. They abandoned
it.

BTW, the AT&T UNIX for PC's had very few device drivers and the ones
that they did have were not very good. There were "driver wars" between
the various 386 UNIX companies with advertisements showing how much
better their systems performed than the competition, or how many more
devices they supported.

Geoff. 


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