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Comment by gwu78 | Hacker News Reader

Linux met the need of people wanting to run UNIX at home, on a PC. To that market, it became available earlier than BSD by a couple of years. And it was free (save for the cost of a long-running internet connection to download it). Were BSD to have been available at the same time, there might (=would) be no Linux. Linus himself has said he would have just used 386BSD.

I'm not sure that demand for running UNIX at home, on a PC existed in 1983. What was the status of the 386 architecture in 1983?

And if it's true that the demand for a UNIX to run on a PC was absent in 1983, then it makes RMS's suggestions all the more interesting. As others have said, RMS was as much ahead of his time as he is weird.

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The 386 was not available in 1983... The 286 was released in 1982. Linus was partially working on Linux initially to get to know the processor in his new machine, the 386.

Anyhow, I don't know why a 386 processor is required for people to want to run Unix. Unix was well established as 'the' OS for serious computing, and MSDOS was not a great alternative. Actually, MicroSoft released a lousy *nix themselves in 1980: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix

So, the idea of running Unix on PC software was mot unusual and made plenty of sense. Not necessarily for home users, but for small businesses and education professionals, who have been a significant market for personal computers all along.

The 386 has an MMU, making it feasible to do preemptive multitasking and virtual memory.

The 286 and 8086 had multitasking based on allowing small programs to run concurrently, but nothing that used a lot of memory.

The competing 68000 also lacked an MMU. The later 68010, I think, had the MMU.

The lack of preemptive multitasking didn't mean that people didn't want to run a Unix-like OS at home, if that's what you mean. MSDOS was horrible, and regardless of the capabilities of your machine one would probably rather use something else.

I had Amigas with 68000s, and one with a 68030. AmigaOS didn't have any special capabilities on a 68030 that it didn't have running on a 68000. AmigaOS was a Unix-like IS with full preemptive multitasking that could operate in 256k of address space, on a 68000.

Oh yeah, DOS sucked. I remember Xenix and MKS and some other unixy toolkit. Oh yeah also Coherent. I ran a shell called Gulam on an Atari, and it was nice. Fake pipes were better than no pipes :)

Did all the processes run in the same address space on the Amiga??

You could do preemptive multitasking with memory protection on a 286. IBM & MS did it in OS/2.

Actually looks like Xenix used that too. http://www.tenox.net/docs/microsoft_xenix_30_286_press_relea...

Really? I though OS/2 was on the 386. I thought that the 286 had some limit on the size of a process, but you could execute multiple processes. I don't know why, but I think it was 64k per process. Also, the other thing I recall was thinking that it was a nice idea.

I was only familiar with 68k so I'm probably wrong here.

Really.

The 286 is a 16-bit CPU so there would have been various memory limits. http://www.os2museum.com/wp/?page_id=313 has some details on what it can do, but not much mention of limits...

The 386 had both protected mode and a large enough address space to make that protected mode useful. The 286 had protected mode as well, but a 16-bit protected mode doesn't let you write programs large enough for it to be worthwhile.

I ran minix on a 286.

[edit] Quick googling found instructions for installing on an XT with 1M RAM and a single 720k floppy:

http://www.minix3.org/iso.previous/Intel-2.0.3/xt/README

I had a 10MB hard drive, so didn't need to go through such gyrations (though I didn't upgrade to a 2nd MB of ram until later)

Given that I remember when we upgraded from a 286 to a 386, and I was born in 1983, I feel pretty confident the status of the 386 architecture in 1983 was "non-existent". Though certainly there were PCs at that point (wikipedia says original "IBM PC" was an 8086 in 1981, and personal computers predated that). Was GNU even targeting PCs originally, though? I recall that RMS's joke bio (early 80's) said he was recently separated from his PDP, which was a mini-computer.

Yes, non-existent. That's what I was suggesting. As I remember it, a lot happened between 1983 and 1991. I did not own a PC that could run UNIX in '83, but I did in 1991. Perhaps it was the same for Torvalds.

No, I don't think RMS's GNU was targetting "PC's", i.e., non-shared computers, in 1983. Few people would have owned them. My point, perhaps missed by others, was that Linux was aimed at a new bit of hardware that many people had acquired by 1991, the 386 PC.

This thread made me nostalgic.

I live in Brazil. I remember when I went to the local university in order to grab a 40+ diskette copy of slackware. A few months later I subscribed to a CDROM compilation (can't recall the name, something like imagemagic) that would mail me a 6 CD case containing many of the early distros every couple months - back in the day downloading it was too expensive (things improved a lot but telecommunications here are still very expensive compared to EUA).

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