On Thu, 24 Oct 2024, Doug Jackson via cctalk wrote:
Yes, UUCP was literally a thing, but UNIX was unobtanium in the early
computing eral - The world of the University Minicomputer.
It certainly wasn't even vaguely accessible by a hobbyist running a
Z80 or 6800 in the late 70's.
I vividly remember being able to take home a NEC 80386 computer from
my day job (I worked for a computer store selling NEC machines) during
the Christmas shutdown between 1987/1988 - It had SCO Xenix installed
and a new graphical system (To SCO) called 'XWindows' Unheard of - I
did a heap of learning.
That was probably the point where a UNIX like operating system became
accessible to people. Then 386BSD arrived (1993) and Linux came (1991)
into the scene and suddenly unix was everywhere - I still remember my
first stack of installation media for freeBSD - something like 10
1.4MB floppies for the Binaries, and another 10 for the source files.
So - yea, UUCP was around, but it wasn't alive in hobbyist circles.
Very slightly before that (not by much), Xenix (Unix without the
trademark royalties, and peddled by MICROS~1) could run on a 80286.
Bill Gates said that the 80286 was "brain dead". (possibly due to the
difficulty of switching back and forth to "protected mode")
The 80386, and even the 80386SX, was a very welcome step.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
