24 Nov
2025
24 Nov
'25
5:11 a.m.
On 24/11/2025 1:16 pm, ben via cctalk wrote:
Not quite true, Minix almost never made it out the
door because IBM had
undocumented logic with memory parity or something like that. The IBM
emulation ran fine, not the PC.
Interesting - never heard about that one!
And is UNIX Comparable a good thing?
Yes, definitely.
What about all the lost USA and UK and USSR computers
and operating systems.
I was part of organizing the first (and next-to-last) USSR UNIX
conference. One funny part was a bunch of Russian academics arguing
over how to best port UNIX to one of their mainframes. Bill Joy
was also attending, and Sun Microsystems donated something like
3000 slightly obsolete Sun workstations to the Russian universities.
He walked up to the microphone and commented "you realize those
workstations run circles around that mainframe...".
This was also when you couldn't export the Apple LaserWriter or
the Yamaha DX7 music synthesizer to the USSR (because they had
processors that were too powerful), not to mention the UNIX
source code. So at one point one of the guys at the local university
we were visiting pointed to a shelf of magnetic tapes and asked
"which version would you like?" :)
Julf