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Xenix was also sold for the 8086.
by my123 5y ago
Xenix was also sold for the 8086.
- rbanffy 5y agoI learned C on a Unix-like OS, QNX, running on a 640K 8088 PC clone. It booted from a 360K floppy and had, in those 360K, a shell, vi and a C compiler.
- jacquesm 5y agoI still miss QNX. Rock solid, super responsive, very tight and a neat model to build scalable applications.
- rbanffy 5y agoI'm probably unhealthily attached to my Blackberry Q10 because of this.
- nullsmack 5y agoWow, I didn't know QNX was always so compact. I remember a demo disk released in '99 or '98 that would boot from one floppy into a graphical environment with a web browser and a few other things. It was really impressive on a single floppy.
- retrac 5y agoThe 8086 was the first microprocessor UNIX was ported to. Maybe unsurprising as the first 16 bit processor that could address more than 64 KB of RAM. 8086 segmentation was and is much-lamented, but it did enable a poor man's form of virtual memory. If the user process never touched the segment registers, the OS could move allocated code, stack and data blocks in RAM around transparently to the process. It also allows every process to assume it starts at address 0.
- throwawayboise 5y agoMinix also ran on the 8086/8088.