[rescue] Interactive Unix questions

[Walter Belgers]

On Jan 10, 2008, at 10:02, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
>> I always thought (but don't know where I got this from - this list?)
>> that Sun had problems porting SunOS to i386 for their 386i system.
>> Eventually, they just bought a UNIX that would run on i386 (i.e.
>> Interactive UNIX) so they could finish SunOS/386i a bit sooner by  
>> just
>> porting the missing drivers.
>
> I may be wrong, but the 386i was NOT a PC. It could not run anything
> that ran on a PC. DOS was provided in a virtual machine enivronment.
> AFAIK the VM was not sophisticated enough to run any protected mode
> operating systems, such as Windows, OS/2, and so on.

Correct, I have a Sun386i here and it certainly does not run plain DOS/ 
Windows/..
But it does contain a 80386 CPU and the only thing that SunOS 4.0 was  
missing from getting it to run on a 386i was the low-lever driver  
stuff. This _was_ present in Interactive UNIX for 80386.

>> From what I understand the 386i was more like a Sun4 computer with
> an 80386 (and a few with 80486) processor.

Yes. Still looking for a 486i. Two or three have been in use at a  
company here in the town I live in. Probably shredded :(

Walter.