On: A bit of XENIX history

[ams6110]

I disagree. I remember running Minix on a no-name 8088 machine with 640K of RAM and no hard drive at all. Unix was developed on machines with far less resources than that. It is not a particularly heavy-weight OS.

[bluedino → ams6110]

Sure, Minix would run on a low-end system, but to have taken the place of Microsoft Windows as the successor to DOS you would have needed a GUI like X which Minix did not have.

[eschaton → ams6110]

And Minix was essentially a clone of IBM PC-IX, which was essentially a UNIX Version 7 for the PC and PC-XT that could also run off floppies.

[yuhong → ams6110]

In fact, MS did make Xenix for 8086 too.