10 May
2022
10 May
'22
10:42 p.m.
In the early '80s UC Santa Barbara had a general assignment teaching lab
full of IBM PC/ATs (i.e. 286s). We convinced the the powers-that-be to
let us run Xenix on them for a remote sensing class, which meant we
could port an image processing system I'd written under v6 (PDP-11/45)
to an actual classroom. Xenix must have been v7 or pretty close, since
the port was painless. (The display driver was a bit harder---it was
(gasp!) 8-bits deep, first display I didn't have to dither on, but it
wasn't memory-mapped, so you had to shovel pixels into it a byte a time.
Made for nice dramatic slow reveals...)
Thanks for the memories!
/James Frew
P.S.: Hardware brevis, software longa: https://github.com/USDA-ARS-NWRC/ipw
On 2022-05-10 09:08, Warner Losh wrote:
Microsoft's Xenix was also in this time frame, but wasn't marketed by
IBM (and its earliest version in 1982 predate Venix, but were only for
Intel's System 86 machines, and may have required an Intel MMU board
(the quick research I did was unclear on this point, other than it was
supported).