11 Feb
2023
11 Feb
'23
1:53 a.m.
On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 07:13:41PM -0500, Henry Mensch wrote:
that would have happened before I arrived in April of
1986. my first job at Athena was to. get folks off those XTs and (mostly) ATs.
This was wildly unsuccessful and unpopular because the replacement hardware wouldn't
be similarly capable... and also because, even then, there were more things that could be
plugged into XTs and ATs. The old platform was perceived as more versatile.
- Henry
So the "old platform" was the National 32016 addon cards that somehow
ran a Unix?
I'd love to learn more about that, I really liked the 320xx architecture,
seemed like a winner but my memory is they were buggy. Still would like
to get some idea of what it was like to run on an XT/AT with that card
plugged in. Did you boot DOS and that somehow booted Unix or what?
--lm