I suppose if you are looking at the "workstation" tier, the humble 386 was not an obvious choice... Most workstations (i.e. NeXT, Sun, IBM, SGI) already had a U

I suppose if you are looking at the "workstation" tier, the humble 386 was not an obvious choice... Most workstations (i.e. NeXT, Sun, IBM, SGI) already had a Unix based OS, so likely creating another one wouldn't have been as fun. 386 boxes came with DOS or Windows... and it Unix was $tupid expensive. The 386 was a runaway winner, and it was pretty clear from the day Compaq released the first 386 powered PC that 386 was the future. It allowed virtualization of 8086 apps (so you could multitask with existing software, which was a huge selling point at the time). It had virtual memory, a critical feature when lots of RAM was 4MB. It also had preemptive multitasking and allowed you to have a flat memory model (even though the 386 memory model was segmented). All the things you need to make a really nice Unix like OS. Other options were either an order of magnitude less popular (i.e. use Motorola 68030 based computer) or technically limiting (use a 286 based PC which had some brutal limitations with memory access).