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

On 3/4/25 4:00 PM, John Levine wrote:

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?
 

I don't remember that one.

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?
 

Which is kinda ironic since Unix was originally funded to be used by "secretaries" in the Bell Labs patent department.  But you are correct,
Unix was mostly used by programmers.