Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!nosc!ucsd!ucsdhub!esosun!seismo!uunet!cme-durer!brickman
From: brickman@cme-durer.ARPA (Jonathan E. Brickman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.misc
Subject: Re: Bsd Unix -- for "SMALL" BBS system?
Message-ID: <600@rtg.cme-durer.ARPA>
Date: 24 Aug 88 15:25:17 GMT
References: <10670@duorion.cair.du.edu>
Reply-To: brickman@rtg (Jonathan E. Brickman)
Organization: The National Bureau of Standards
Lines: 23

In article <10670@duorion.cair.du.edu> you write:
>If you are running BSD Unix 4.[2][3] -- do you have to have a Vax/Microvax?
>Is it possible to bring BSD down to a PC (yeah -- I know.. try not to laugh
>to hard about this question -- even though it sounds a little primative
>:-) ;-).  What is the MINIMUM Hardware??

I'm pretty sure that there exists a port of Unix (whether BSD or not
I'm not sure) for all PC-DOS machines.
Not that it's any good; your speed would be atrocious if you even attempted
to use daemon-ing, etc., to get multitasked efficiency out of your
BBS (a la by backgrounding message saves, etc., etc.).
'286 ports are more common, and quite a bit faster; I think someone
has (finally) produced a protected-mode-based '286 Unix; am I correct, all
you netters?  Several sources have come out with '386-based Unixes, all
of which are bound to be rawther nice.  I would strongly suspect,
though, that the best Unix bang for the buck is in the AT&T Unix PCs,
which are apparently proliferating as of the past few years.  Those
things have superb internal architecture (Hey, Unix PCers,
what's your CPU?  I know your RAM is super-fast, among other things),
and seem to be the only really consistent lowest-common-denominator
Unix machine.
Do I hear any rebuttal?
||Jonathan E. Brickman