BRACKENRIDGE%USC-ISIB@sri-unix.UUCP (01/15/84)
From: Billy <BRACKENRIDGE@USC-ISIB> As everybody probably knows by now on Thursday IBM announced a Unix system for the XT written by Interactive Systems of Santa Monica. It is called Personal Computer Interactive Executive (PC/IX). I stopped by yesterday (Friday) to take a look at the new system and pick up a copy of the announcement. I am not a Unix expert so I won't try to give a detailed criticism of the system from a Unix point of view. It will be on display at Uniform (a Unix conference) next week along with a lot of other PC Unixes. If anyone attends, we would like to receive a report. If anyone can give us a detailed comparison between Microsoft Xenix and PC/IX I would be particularly interested. This is a real Unix based on Bell Labs System III. Interactive Systems has added their own screen editor (INed) to the system. This editor uses direct screen writes and has horizontal as well as vertical scrolling. It is very fast and makes for a nice user interface to the shell. It is a delight to see disk I/O and other processing overlapped at last. I understand there was nothing in the contract that said they actually had to use the ROM BIOS in the XT so they managed to bypass all that busy wait I/O. The result is an apparent improvement in performance over disk intensive tasks under MS-DOS. While this is a single user Unix there is support for multiple user logins and password security. I understand the user can access the system through the communications port, but of course performance won't be as snappy. IBM is billing this as a text processing and program development work station. There is of course a C compiler as well as run time library, lint, make, etc etc... The announcement mentions SCCS Source Code Control System. I don't know if this is standard Unix or an Interactive Systems enhancement. I didn't get a chance to see what they have for electronic mail support. I would assume mail is read through the INed editor. I am told UUCP is in place and that the system can act as a usenet host to send and receive mail. Networking is glaringly absent. Any interconnection between systems is via COMM ports and UUCP or terminal protocols. I have no idea as to how difficult it would be to add IP/TCP support to this flavor Unix. PC/IX will run on an XT or PC with expansion cabinet. It requires 256K of memory, but IBM recommends 512K and a second disk for applications with large data requirements. PC/IX can live with DOS in a partitioned disk environment and has programs to convert files between DOS and PC/IX. The real bad news is the product is supported by IBM. This means we have the same relationship with Interactive Systems that we have with Microsoft. ie. we have to submit our complaints and bugs to IBM who may or may not pass them on as they deem fit to the contracting vendor. The developers at Interactive Systems have been reading INFO-IBMPC as do people at Microsoft and IBM etc. but of course couldn't respond due to security considerations as the mere fact that they knew what an IBM XT is would have blown the story. If a customer buys more than 20 systems he qualifies for support from the IBM Office Systems Customer Assistance Center through the IBM Electronic Support Facility for the IBM Personal Computer - PC/INFO. The system does not come standard with a source license, but source licenses are available from Interactive Systems. I don't know the price for a source license, but the standard package costs $900 -------
robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison) (01/18/84)
I'm interested in getting PC/IX for my PC. Why do I need an expansion cabinet? I'll be happy to load up on memory, and set up maybe 512k plus 128k of RAMDISK for temporary files generated by Unix on the fly. Will PC/IX on the PC be much worse than PC/IX on the XT? - Toby Robison decvax!ittvax!eosp1!robison or: allegra!eosp1!robison (maybe: princeton!eosp1!robison)