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From: "Brian G. Lucas" <bagel99@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Why VAX Was the Ultimate CISC and Not RISC
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2025 11:46:22 -0500
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On 3/3/25 9:09 PM, John Levine wrote:
> According to Brian G. Lucas <bagel99@gmail.com>:
>>>>> That was not what customers were interested in.  There were various
>>>>> Unix variants available for the PC, but the customers preferred using
>>>>> DOS, which was preinstalled and did not cost extra. ...
>>>
>>> Yup.  PC/IX was a really nice Unix port for the IBM PC and nobody was interested.
>>>
>> As this (the kernel part) was my project, it was very disappointing.  I think
>> IBM priced such that with DOS being "free", it had no chance.
> 
> 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.