Re: PC/IX, not, Why VAX Was the Ultimate CISC and Not RISC

According to Brian G. Lucas <bagel99@gmail.com>:

Nobody knew what the market for PC/IX was supposed to be beyond some
handwaving "if 5% if PC users buy it we'll be rich."  PC/IX could do
anything a PDP-11 running Unix could do, give or take peripherals,
but the PC market was very different from the PDP-11 market and by
that time the PDP-11 was rather long in the tooth.
 

Maybe everyting except for lack of memory protection.
IBM sold it as a single user system.

The lack of memory protection turned out not to matter very much. Didn't we once
get a bug report for something that only failed after the system had been up
continuously for a year?

It didn't help that PC/IX and Unix in general had very few applications for
non-technical users. There was document processing with nroff and troff, with
our INed screen editor, but what else?

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