It's what it sounds like: v7 Unix ported to x86. Unix v7 was portable enough and the PDP-11 architecturally similar enough to x86 that almost all the code works without change. (Many of the changes from v6 to v7 were to make Unix more portable; it was already running on at least 4 different architectures by 1980.)
I wonder if the obscurity is because the x86 v7 source was an archive inside an archive? Seems a minor thing but not having it to browse online is likely to be an off-ramp for most.
https://www.nordier.com/v7x86/v7x86-0.8a-all.tar.xz has releases/v7x86-0.8a.tar.bz2 (you'll want to use a -C prefix it explodes in the current directory). Source is in usr/sys and usr/src like normal for v7 Unix.
And yes, your modern Linux system's GNU tar is reading the ancient v7 tar format just fine. Neat, eh?
You might find the modern "file" command can still recognize the v7 a.out binary format too:
$ file usr/bin/compress
usr/bin/compress: a.out little-endian 32-bit executable not stripped
I can't imagine how FAST that system would feel with modern hardware.
Motif? What version of SCO UNIX?
My eval box for my work Xenix deployments was an 80286: an IBM PC-AT with 512 kB of RAM. Everything worked.
OK, SCO Xenix not SCO Unix, but I deployed production Xenix boxes with 4MB of RAM on 80386DX processors.
It ran well and supported 4-6 users no problem. As I recall, one customer had 8 users and they needed a RAM upgrade. I think, dimly now as this wasn't my department, it was eye-wateringly expensive. Something in the region of £5,000 to £6,000 (at the time, $10K+).
We did deploy one box with just 2 MB of RAM, but that didn't work well once a few users on terminals logged in. They had to upgrade the RAM.
FWIW these were 32-bit 386 machines, but with no CPU cache – the lower-end IBM PS/2 Model 80 variants of the time, with 16 MHz and 20 MHz CPUs. (The top-end 25MHz Model 70 had a small SRAM cache for the CPU. It cost over £10,000 with no screen, keyboard or mouse, and my Acorn Archimedes A310, which cost me £800, absolutely smoked it: it was about 4x as fast.)
That's when I knew Arm would eventually eat x86: in 1989. It's finally happening now.
But I was running PC DOS and DOS software in a window on my ARM desktop in 1989, in pure software emulation, and it was sluggish but usable. CPU was equivalent to a 2-2.5 MHz 8086, but disk performance was better than a screaming fast SCSI disk, so it balanced out.
>That's when I knew Arm would eventually eat x86: in 1989. It's finally happening now.
I had kind of the reverse feeling: when the 486 came out, I knew those expensive SPARC and MIPS workstations were all doomed.
Xenix was also my introduction to UNIX.
However due to our school resources, there was a single PC tower running it, we had to prepare our examples in MS-DOS using Turbo C 2.0, and API mocks, and take 15m turns at the Xenix PC.
Oh, absolutely, yes. It's one of the historical inflection points that's visible.
My favourites...
• MS wanted to go with Xenix but DOS proved a hit so it changed course.
• DR had multitasking Concurrent DOS on the 80286 in 1985, but Intel's final released chip removed the feature CDOS needed, so it pivoted to FlexOS and RTOSes, leaving the way open to MS and OS/2 and Windows.
• MS wanted OS/2 1.x to be 386-specific but IBM said no. As a result, OS/2 1.x was cripped by being a 286 OS, it flopped, and IBM lost the x86 market.
• Quarterdeck nearly had DESQview/X out before Windows 3: a TCP/IP enabled X11-based multitasking DOS extended that bridged DOS to Unix and open systems... but it was delayed and so when it appeared it was too late.
* GNU discussed and evaluated adopting the BSD kernel for the GNU OS, but decided to go with Mach. Had it gone for the BSD kernel, there would have been a complete working FOSS Unix for 386 at the end of the 1980s, Linux would never have happened, and Windows 3 might not have been such a hit that it led to NT.
I got whole series of articles out of this, titled in honour of Douglas Adam's fake trilogy about god...
#1
https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/where_computing_went_...
#2
https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/where_computing_went_...
#3
https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/04/where_computing_went_...
With apologies to Oolon Colluphid. ;-)
Never saw one of those. Tandy computers did exist in the UK, and even here on the Isle of Man there was a single Tandy's store. (They weren't called "Radio Shack" here.) But while they sold lots of spares and components and toys, they didn't sell that many computers.
> I had kind of the reverse feeling: when the 486 came out, I knew those expensive SPARC and MIPS workstations were all doomed.
Well, yes. Flipside of the same coin.
Expensive RISC computers were doomed. Arm computers weren't expensive back then: they were considerably cheaper than PCs of the same spec. So for a while, they thrived, then when they couldn't compete on performance they moved into markets where they could compete on power consumption... which they then ruled for 30 years.
https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html
It ran really fast. Also, if Dillo ran snappy under a 486 (today so-so except for a slight delay because of TLS, but bearable once the page it's rendered), Dillo today runs at light speeds. This on my n270 netbook under OpenBSD. With NetBSD, it would run slightly faster.
https://www.unisys.com/product-info-sheet/ecs/clearpath-mast...
https://www.unisys.com/client-education/mcp-clearpath-server...
However you can get into the documentation for free,
NEWP manual, the systems language,
https://public.support.unisys.com/aseries/docs/ClearPath-MCP...
https://public.support.unisys.com/aseries/docs/ClearPath-MCP...
Overall documentation,
https://public.support.unisys.com/aseries/docs/ClearPath-MCP...
The original system back in 1960's,
Even Macs were an entirely different codebase that didn’t even have memory protection or preemptive multitasking, which very much changed how you used it.
https://worrydream.com/refs/Ornstein_2002_-_Computing_in_the...
Apropos of that, I couldn't resist telling Gemini 3 to run with your story prompt from the earlier thread: https://gemini.google.com/share/ac122aba6f7f. Thanks for the inspiration, apologies for following it. :-P
(Also thanks for posting the material you wrote back in the 1980s on the SCP initiative. I had heard of it as an SDI connection or component, but that was all. Reading through it now.)
There's a UNIX shape void in the embedded world. Todays microcontrollers routinely come with several megabytes of RAM.
1: https://github.com/RetroBSD/retrobsd
2: https://github.com/RetroBSD/retrobsd/tree/master/src/cmd/sma...
Supports Arm M0 (Raspberry Pi Pico), ESP32 and a variety of others, including Z80.
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