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From: "Brian G. Lucas" <bagel99@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: PC/IX, not, Why VAX Was the Ultimate CISC and Not RISC
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2025 17:51:11 -0500
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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.