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Ah, one of the early 386 protected mode OSes, developed back when MS/IBM was focusing on the 286 for OS/2. To be honest, I think 386s was expensive back then.
by yuhong 13y ago
Ah, one of the early 386 protected mode OSes, developed back when MS/IBM was focusing on the 286 for OS/2. To be honest, I think 386s was expensive back then.
- stan_rogers 13y agoI remember Xenix as an available OS on the $9K-ish TRS-80 Model 16 (Z80 for I/O + 68000 for processing).
- einhverfr 13y agoI remember Xenix as the OS that wouldn't recognize certain brands of floppy drives or many VGA cards, because it didn't support going through BIOS. This brings back memories. Insert floppy disk 1, boots... Asks for floppy disk 2. Insert it.... Floppy disk drive not found. (granted this was a laptop that Xenix wasn't designed to support) Or insert floppy disk 1, boot.... Screen goes black...... Basically with Xenix (at least the versions I played with) your choices of hardware were so limited you needed to use systems specifically designed for the OS.
- yuhong 13y agoOf course, now all modern OSes no longer go through BIOS for standard VGA registers or floppy drive access.
- einhverfr 13y agoBut Xenix didn't even support standard VGA registers or any standards regarding floppy drives. It required internal knowledge of specific products to work at all.
- kjs3 13y agoMost of us used it via serial port.
- ja27 13y agoAbsolutely. A TRS-80 running Microsoft Xenix was my first Unix-like, back in high school. 6-12 terminals full of students typing in COBOL from their coding forms. It replaced an older Burroughs with a card punch. I thought I was learning some obscure Tandy environment. (I was a Commodore kid, looking down on the "Trash 80"). Little did I know I'd be using a version of vi and sh for the next 30 years.
- pekk 13y ago> Ah, one of the early 386 protected mode OSes, developed back when MS/IBM was focusing on the 286 for OS/2. To be honest, I think 386s was expensive back then. I don't think this is accurate. Xenix pre-existed the 386 and was used on other processors before and after it supported the 386. Since I thought maybe I was going crazy, I checked Wikipedia and read, for example, "Version 2.0 of Xenix was released in 1985 and was based on UNIX System V. An update numbered 2.1.1 added support for the Intel 80286 processor"
- yuhong 13y agoI know. I am talking in the sense that its 386 port predated other 386 OSes.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoCouldn't Xenix run even on an 8086? I don't think it required an MMU at all.
- kjs3 13y agoThere were successive Xenix versions for 8086, 80286 and 80386.