• Re: PC/IX, not, Why VAX Was the Ultimate CISC and Not RISC

    From John Levine@21:1/5 to All on Tue Mar 4 21:00:59 2025
    According to Brian G. Lucas <bagel99@gmail.com>:
    Nobody knew what the market for PC/IX was supposed to be beyond some
    handwaving "if 5% if PC users buy it we'll be rich." PC/IX could do
    anything a PDP-11 running Unix could do, give or take peripherals,
    but the PC market was very different from the PDP-11 market and by
    that time the PDP-11 was rather long in the tooth.

    Maybe everyting except for lack of memory protection.
    IBM sold it as a single user system.

    The lack of memory protection turned out not to matter very much. Didn't we once
    get a bug report for something that only failed after the system had been up continuously for a year?

    It didn't help that PC/IX and Unix in general had very few applications for non-technical users. There was document processing with nroff and troff, with our INed screen editor, but what else?

    --
    Regards,
    John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
    Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)