WOW!!!! $15k DEC PDP-8 CLASSIC MINICOMPUTER SYSTEM DIGITAL PDP8

[Tony Duell]

> 
> On Tue, 2005-07-12 at 19:51 +0100, Tony Duell wrote:
> > > Actually, are we only counting machines that ran Unix-a-like systems, or
> > > anything in the workstation class? (i.e. does PERQ qualify? :-)
> > 
> > And just how would you describe PNX? 
> > It was available for the PERQ 1 and 2 machines (AFAIK there never was a 
> > version for the PERQ 2T4, and the 68020-based PERQ 3a ran nothing else).
> 
> Ahhh... I didn't know the 3a was purely a Unix system...
> (I knew about PNX - just thought that hardly anyone ran it on the 1 & 2
> machines as everyone was running POS, and that was supposed to be the
> primary OS for the systems)

Some PERQ-fanatics don't consider the 3a to be a real PERQ. After all,
it's got a single-chip processor running a fixed instruction set (and not
a board of chips with user-modifyable microcode), it's got an
optomechanical mouse (and not an electromagnetic tablet), it's got a SCSI
disk interface (and not a custom disk controller that can put filesystem
pointers in the sector headers), etc. The 3a is almost, but not quite 
'yet another unix box'. Not quite because it does have a 
user-microcodable processor -- the graphics one. 

On the classic PERQs (1, 1a, 2T1, 2T2), there are several available OSes. 
POS is single-tasking, but has the advantage of supporting user-written 
microcode. PNX is unix with a windowing front end -- it's not bad, but why 
get a PERQ and just run unix on it. There's also Accent, which I know 
little about other than it's muiti-user and uses something close to the 
POS filesystem.

-tony