Oh wow, a UNIX for PC compatibles that I actually hadn’t heard off. I’m amazed at how long it was supported:
The last version was “System V/386 Release 3.2 Version 4.1.1”, released in July 1998. Official support ended on July 23, 2006, five years after Sun withdrew the product from sale.
A bit more interesting than Interactive UNIX is its precedessor PC/IX, from the same company, which ran on 8088 systems with no MMU. It competed with Venix/86 and the unmapped 8086 version of Xenix. They were specifically advertised as compatible with off-the-shelf IBM PC XTs and IBM even sold it as an option.
IIRC initially, there were other DOSes around like IBM PC-DOS. And people also figured out how to install Windows, so I guess that might not be sufficient explanation.
Oh wow, a UNIX for PC compatibles that I actually hadn’t heard off. I’m amazed at how long it was supported:
Why does it say copyright of Microsoft 1988 in the video, we’re they connected?
My guess is that they have licensed some of the x86 code from Microsoft’s Xenix.
A bit more interesting than Interactive UNIX is its precedessor PC/IX, from the same company, which ran on 8088 systems with no MMU. It competed with Venix/86 and the unmapped 8086 version of Xenix. They were specifically advertised as compatible with off-the-shelf IBM PC XTs and IBM even sold it as an option.
Amazing! Since it was quite available for PCs, I wonder why UNIX never really caught on until essentially the late nineties when Linux arrived.
Cost. The licenses were (relatively) expensive.
Bundling?
MS made sure that every new PC came with DOS so almost nobody would even realize they could use anything else.
IIRC initially, there were other DOSes around like IBM PC-DOS. And people also figured out how to install Windows, so I guess that might not be sufficient explanation.