There seems to have been a brief surge of interest in Unix-style systems when the 286 (and maybe 386) first came to market, since there was enough hardware to do a full-fat protected-mode OS now. The first exposure I had to Unix concepts was some old (already at the time, this was probably like 1993 or so) library book discussing "things to do with your shiny new IBM AT."
I suspect Unix on Early PCs fell to business concerns. If you bought an AT (or 286/386 in general) it was going to come with DOS, because anything Unix flavoured was an expensive aftermarket add-on.
Would it have been different if the AT&T/BSD legal hassles had finished earlier? Imagine if there was a "286BSD" available at basically the same time as the AT; IBM would have an affordable OS that made a good demo for the kit they were selling, and being able to offer it for essentially the cost of the floppies might have made it the obvious "grown up" alternative to DOS. There would have been less need for the grand OS/2 effort, and probably far less effort devoted to DOS extensions.
One of the alternate histories of the modern computer era is one in which AT&T made peace with BSD. There were of course also many minicomputer OSs that were no longer of significant commercial interest by, say, the mid-80s that could have been interesting as open source options. Something like Linux was probably inevitable but Linux itself was probably not.
I suspect Unix on Early PCs fell to business concerns. If you bought an AT (or 286/386 in general) it was going to come with DOS, because anything Unix flavoured was an expensive aftermarket add-on.
Would it have been different if the AT&T/BSD legal hassles had finished earlier? Imagine if there was a "286BSD" available at basically the same time as the AT; IBM would have an affordable OS that made a good demo for the kit they were selling, and being able to offer it for essentially the cost of the floppies might have made it the obvious "grown up" alternative to DOS. There would have been less need for the grand OS/2 effort, and probably far less effort devoted to DOS extensions.