I got my 286 in late 83, didn't get a HD for it and install unix until maybe 85 or 6. I paid money for Microport (not to be confused with Micropro, which had OS9, a unix work-alike for real time, not to be confused with OS2...) which licensed System V (and Im' thinking SVr3.4, I must have the books somewhere). It was less than half the price of Xenix, but Xenix was available. It was around 92 that I switched to linux when I got my 486. Up to that time I had made do with a 386 daughter-card for my 286, which was what brought my memory all the way up to 1536K, woo hoo; I had been 512 + 256 + 128 = 896, I think, by populating up the motherboard (which came with 512, the original IBM AT) and an expansion/extension card (I dont remember which was which now).
The distro was a box full of many > 3 floppies, Slackware? that seemed better than downloading over my phone line, which was maybe 1200 baud then? I mean, bps :-) Tony? Peter On 4/9/07, Michael Will <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I used minix on 286 briefly until I found out about the 3-floppy MCC linux distribution that included gcc around 1992 ;-) I never got to play with amoeba since both Minix and Amoeba where not free at the time linux came out - did you? http://www.cs.vu.nl/pub/amoeba/amoeba.html shows an 80 node amoeba cluster based on sparc and seems to be free now. Michael ------------------------------ *From:* [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] *On Behalf Of *Peter St. John *Sent:* Monday, April 09, 2007 2:54 PM *To:* Tony Travis *Cc:* Beowulf Mailing List *Subject:* Re: [Beowulf] Win64 Clusters!!!!!!!!!!!! Tony, I should have said, ** I ** wouldn't have reasonably expected unix to run on an 8088 at the time (System V booted with 512K on a 286 but "vi temp" hung so I had to expand memory). At the time I was unaware of any versions besides Berkeley and AT&T. Now of course even IBM can boot linux on a wrist-watch (but the power supply is ungainly). At the time 8-bit word seemed inadequate; I could not find a way to buy quantity one 3B2 from Ma, so motorolla ( e.g. Fortune 32:16 nice box in '83 made me want a unix workstation for home) and intel 286 seemed like only options I could find. But I didn't know about usenet back then. When was Minix ported to 8088? Some people kept PDP11s running for a pretty long time :-) Peter On 4/9/07, Tony Travis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Peter St. John wrote: > > Well, I could run unix with all 1536K, but not MS/PCDOS 3.2. So call > it > > a software issue of failing to work around the hardware issue. > Obviously > > the hardware was not a show-stopper. > > > > But it was the 286 I did this on, not the earlier 8088, which I don't > > think could reasonably have been expected to run unix; but the > original > > comment regarded the 80286. > > Hello, Peter. > > People have very short memories! Minix runs fine on an 8088: > > http://www.neonbox.org/minix_laptop/index.html > > I replaced a pdp11/34 running Unix version 7 with an 8086 running Minix! > > > Hmm... I wonder if anyone remembers Amoeba? > > Tony. > -- > Dr. A.J.Travis, | mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Rowett Research Institute, | http://www.rri.sari.ac.uk/~ajt > Greenburn Road, Bucksburn, | phone:+44 (0)1224 712751 > Aberdeen AB21 9SB, Scotland, UK. | fax:+44 (0)1224 716687 > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf > >
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