[lug] Old Unix, was Re: SGI Onyx 2

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Wed, 2010-03-31 at 16:50 -0600, Jeffrey Haemer wrote:

> By 1983, when I joined them, someone at IBM had decided to provide
> Unix on their exciting, new powerhouse, the PC/XT -- the first
> mass-market personal computer with a Winchester (hard) disk.    (I
> think the XT was as powerful as a PDP-11/20, FWIW.)   

I wonder if that was Ken Witte.  He came from IBM to Dell in the late
80's (along with Glen Henry, now of Centaur, maker of the chips in the
mini-ITX boards) to work on Dell Unix, a port of SVR3.x (later SVR4) to
Dell PCs.  I got into Unix there, in the support group and as a test
engineer (1989-1991).  Thomas Roell, author of the original X server for
PC Unix (X386) worked there for a awhile as he got his Masters.

I vaguely remember the SVR3 stuff may have came from ISC but the SVR4
stuff was an AT&T Unix license.  They waaaaaay overpriced the stuff
which made it really hard to sell on PCs, even against over priced
Windows 3.1.  But we had a few customers, like NASA and a waste
collection company in Washington, strangely enough.

Anyway, long time ago.  Times sure change.

-- 
Michael J. Hammel                                    Principal Software Engineer
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org                           http://graphics-muse.org
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