The AT&T Unix PC from 1984 - why did it fail?
Posted by penkster@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 51 comments
Okay okay I totally did the clicky-thumbnail. It's all the rage in youtube nowadays. But this is my favorite computer in my collection, so it was cool doing a tech breakdown and also looking into why the machine was a commercial failure.
https://youtu.be/_x3uxKfFI-0
rosmaniac@reddit
I owned a couple of UnixPC's, one a 7300 and the other a 3B1. I ran CNews on the 3B1 with a Maxtor XT2190 hard disk. It replaced a Tandy 6000, running Xenix on its 68000, that was limited to 1MB of RAM versus the 3.5MB that a base 2MB 3B1 plus a combo card could muster. Plus the 3B1 ran Convergent's System V R2 where the T6K was limited to System III, making the software selection a bit easier.
I replaced the 3B1 with an Apollo DN3500 with 24MB of RAM. Apollo Domain/OS, the Unix with multiple personalities; you could change an environment variable and seamlessly go from Apollo's Aegis environment to a 4.3BSD environment to a System V R3 environment... Freakazoic.
sjclynn@reddit
Unix was never a viable solution on the desktop. Cost was a serious issue. The Unix license cost more than a rather complete IBM/PC. Serial communications really required some hardware assistance. Every keystroke had to be processed against a list of hot keys, and the user level process had to be available. Running a couple of terminals was fine but going past that made the response pretty dismal.
People were buying IBM/PCs for basically one reason: Lotus123. It was never ported to Unix.
Fortune was probably the first to try it. ComputerLand was the first national chain of computer stores. It started with a pretty good launch. Banners in the windows, end-cap position and training for the sales people. As the weeks went on, the display worked its way toward the back of the store and then disappeared.
AT&T was never a serious player in the Unix market. To be fair, they sold a lot of 3b series computers, but the majority of them were installed as phone switches. The 7300 never fit in. All but the 7300 ran with a Western Electric processor. In spite of the fact that Western Electric, part of the AT&T family wrote and maintained the Unix code set, AT&T teamed up with Convergent to port the code to the platform.
TMWNN@reddit
It didn't help that Radio Shacks were everywhere, and Tandy Computer Centers sold the Model 16! Unix Review said in 1985 that Tandy had sold 50K Xenix-capable systems or "about 55 units per store per year-not bad, but hardly a smashing success". I think Fortune would have killed for that kind of volume.
rosmaniac@reddit
In 1984 the TRS-80 Model 16B was the most popular Unix computer in the world, according to an article in InfoWorld ( https://books.google.com/books?id=5C4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA28#v=onepage&q&f=false ).
thejpster@reddit
Lotus 1-2-3 apparently was ported to UNIX, in 1990.
https://winworldpc.com/product/lotus-1-2-3/1x-unix
Someone then ported it to Linux a few years back.
sjclynn@reddit
The ports were very limited. The Unix version was for SCO Xenix. One of the basic problems was that there was little executable compatibility between systems, even within the same vendor. It was common for companies to build a product line from several OEM vendors. Unix did bring a degree of compatibility at the source code level so completing a port for a new system was generally possible. There were some products that depended pretty heavily on assembly rather than C. Those were difficult to port.
By 1990, the Unix market had tightened and many of the early players had left the field, so to speak. Plexus, for example, folded suddenly when a funding round collapsed in 1989. They had pivoted away from Unix a couple of years earlier.
gf99b@reddit
Yeah, most of the Unix boxes from the day were from other companies like Sun, Apollo, etc., even though AT&T was the parent of Unix.
mattmattatwork@reddit
If you've ever dealt with AT&T customer service, you know why.
dpdxguy@reddit
Unix was not a good platform for PC users in the 80s. And AT&T was not willing to invest the resources necessary to turn it into the kind of platform PC users expected in the 80s.
HurryHurryHippos@reddit
We used Xenix 286 - it wasn't terrible. Xenix 386 was much better.
dpdxguy@reddit
Yeah. The 80286 had memory management capabilities that were far superior to the 8086. But holy smokes were they byzantine!
Sorry-Climate-7982@reddit
This was an answer to a question nobody had asked....
There was Xenix, Interactive Unix, and a few others plus SCO, BSD, UTS, etc.
Some kept one of these as a reference port
smuckola@reddit
For an extra $1000 license? What did you use it for?
dpdxguy@reddit
The startup I worked for used a PC/XT running PC/IX as a prototype for a product we were developing. The multi-tasking capabilities of Unix were far superior for the prototype software than any other operating system available at the time. Eventually the prototype software was ported to a Plexus 68020 based Unix system.
R-ten-K@reddit
That's bonkers I had no idea there was a Unix for the 8086. I can't even work out how they managed to make unix work there without an MMU or FPU.
dpdxguy@reddit
Unix has no need for an FPU. Floating point C libraries exist.
If I remember right, the first Unix ports didn't have (or maybe use) an MMU either.
R-ten-K@reddit
True, but the initial versions of unix on those old machines sort of "simulated" multi process operation, only one process in memory allowed at that time (everything else swapped out).
So I wondered if that is how the 8086 Unix versions operated as well, or there were 3rd party MMU hardware used.
dpdxguy@reddit
I don't remember the details of how control was transferred between processes. But I know PC/IX ran on a bog standard PC/XT. No third party MMU hardware was used or even supported.
There were other Unix-like operating systems that ran on an 8086 PC too, most notably Andrew Tanenbaum's MINIX. The complete source code for MINIX was originally published in Tanenbaum's book Operating Systems Design and Implementation.
The source is now available at https://git.minix3.org/ if you're interested in how it works. But, of course, it's not actually Unix.
R-ten-K@reddit
No worries, I am painfully acquainted with how Minix works (on account of having taken an operating systems class that used his book) ;)
bobj33@reddit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix#History
This doc has more info
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/intel/system3xx/172758-001_Introduction_to_the_System_86_330_and_380_Systems_Mar83.pdf
Sun started out on the Motorola 68000 before designing their own SPARC CPU. The original M68K Sun workstations had an MMU designed by Sun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-1
scubascratch@reddit
Home many concurrent users could an 8088 with 640k of ram support? What was the terminals setup?
sunnyinchernobyl@reddit
MP/M running on a Z80 could support 8 users.
penkster@reddit (OP)
This fact still blows me away. I'd love to build up an MP/M setup and try it. One of my early jobs had a Televideo TS804 configured to do this. It was black magic (that's why in my wargames video ((https://youtu.be/p-B1clodRJ4?si=EXfFR6w3LF-eyBej)) I get so excited seeing Televideo terminals :)
scubascratch@reddit
Wargames was a transformative experience for me. I was 16 years old and had an Apple II+ and a Tandy M100 at the time and strongly identified with Broderick’s character. I had a 300 baud acoustic coupler modem I used for compuserve and BBSes. After seeing that movie I saved up some money and bought an “Anchor Automation” 1200 baud self dialing modem (which I still keep as a memento), and immediately wrote a war-dialing program to find other systems to call. That didn’t find much, but I was into low-level phreaking as well and back then AT&T had recently been busted up and Sprint was just starting out and they only had 6 digit authorization codes for long distance access. I modified the war dialer to instead hunt for working Sprint authorization codes. The modem would dial some 1-800 number to get into sprint, then dial in an auth #, then the LD number you wanted to call, I just used a compuserve dial up end point as the test destination to see if the auth code worked. The first night I ran the dialer I had 6 new auth codes by the next morning. Thankfully I moved onto less gray activities before too long and had a successful career in software and embedded engineering.
sunnyinchernobyl@reddit
My college used Dynabyte (S100 MP/M systems) for registration/bursar office stuff. They sold it all for pennies in the late 80s and I picked up a bunch of them. I had several working MP/M systems with 8” floppy drives and a hard drive. The units weighed a ton.
dpdxguy@reddit
We just used the console. So it was less a question of concurrent users and more a question of concurrent processes.
PC/IX processes were restricted to one 64KB text segment and one 64KB data segment. Swapping to the XT's hard drive was painfully slow, so we did everything we could to keep everything in memory at all times. :)
penkster@reddit (OP)
More than you'd think. 8086 machines running Xenix could do 3-4-5 terminals comfortably - most used an external terminal controller that handled most of the IO. Sending text to a terminal doesn't take much CPU, it's the processing on the back end that's rough. Just typing is pretty simple.
I've run 3 external terminals on my UnixPC in the past, and it hummed okay, as long as it had enough memory.
sjclynn@reddit
Small world. I worked for Plexus from 1982 to 1988. If you had a Hayes modem, I wrote the dialer code for it.
I_Think_I_Cant@reddit
You're the ATDT guy?
sjclynn@reddit
No, this is at the modem level. It was the programming to place a call on a POTS line using a modem. The Hayes protocol became the industry standard.
I_Think_I_Cant@reddit
All I remember from the time was the Hayes AT commands. Looking through that list it's amazing how many I still remember.
Still, pretty cool gig. All the modems I had were Hayes except for a couple of Commodore branded ones for the 64.
sjclynn@reddit
I was in a field sales office at the time, Kansas City. I had my own P/40 which was about the size of a small refrigerator. I needed to be able to connect to HQ and had a Hayes 1200 baud modem. One thing led to another. It wasn't fancy, but it worked.
dpdxguy@reddit
Small world indeed. I'm sure I used your dialer to connect to my company's UUCP neighbor. :)
sjclynn@reddit
Who did you work for?
dpdxguy@reddit
It was a small (and eventually failed) startup in Portland Oregon named Teneron.
sjclynn@reddit
My title when I left was Director of Home Office Customer Support. The job was managing field service.
wrosecrans@reddit
It really is hard to project back into a mindset where DOS was absolutely "good enough" for business computing. The CPU in an early PC was fast enough to add up the numbers on a spreadsheet pretty quick. But RAM and hard disks were still insanely expensive. So having a big suite of general purpose tools installed, and being able to run multiple programs at the same time, was mostly still expensive overhead rather than a practical feature in the early 80's.
Who needs a C compiler if the PC is basically going to be an appliance that only runs VisiCalc 8 hours a day anyway?
By the late 80's, a PC was big enough for something like Unix, but the PC had suddenly become such a universal platform that running PC software actually was the huge compatibility selling point that a lot of people had previously assumed that running Unix software was going to be.
penkster@reddit (OP)
Yep, you're 100% right. I run that down toward the end. It was SO COOL, but just plain wasn't viable.
HurryHurryHippos@reddit
The company I worked for had one of these - we were a software company with a mid-level accounting software system (would now be called "ERP"). It ran on Unix and DOS (later Windows) systems.
We had AT&T 3B2 systems and got one of these and one customer had a compatible 3B1 system.
These were dog slow with a chirping hard drive. The "GUI" was an interesting text UI that could be operated with a mouse.
nchiker35@reddit
In my first job at ComputerLand we had one of these on the floor. It was so slow to boot up that we just kept it booted up. I was in highschool but I was the head technician of the store. I set-up the 7300 and installed the software on it.
Every sales person tried to sale it to get, what at the time, was a rather good bonus. But there really were not good use cases for it.
We sold the 6300 rather well, and it was a strange beast as well, but at least it was competitively priced.
Alternative-Grade103@reddit
Was not AT&T locked into a long, drawn out lawsuit with UC Berkley over the rights to Unix? This with the eventual (and eagerly anticipated) result that BSD *nix was to be feely shared. As, indeed did eventually happen.
What market then for costly AT&T product? The only winner of that fight was Linux.
gf99b@reddit
As someone who loves vintage computers and anything related to the Bell System/AT&T, I've always wanted to own a Unix PC or one of its bigger brothers from the 3B2 series. (Sadly they're relatively rare and I've *never* seen any come up for sale around here.) But I could imagine a lack of software support and sluggish performance probably prevented the Unix PC/7300 from gaining much success in the market. Despite being the creator/parent of Unix, AT&T had competitors to deal with like Sun, Apollo and later NeXT who had better offerings - especially for businesses, who were the primary users of Unix back then.
If you haven't seen it yet, here's the introduction video for the Unix PC/7300: https://youtu.be/JJlz0JIbHt8?si=pv5YMMt1pgg19rtj
AT&T also made an "Account Executive Briefing" video made for sales reps that went along with the above video: https://youtu.be/V7q1HOjm74o?si=qH5LzUA4Zg0pcv_I
penkster@reddit (OP)
At the Vintage Computer Fest East last weekend, there were 3 3B2 300's up for sale. You could have gotten them for a song!
gf99b@reddit
Unfortunately we don't have any VCF shows around here, the closest one is usually held in Chicago which is still 7+ hours away.
Ok_Programmer_4449@reddit
AT&T had no clue how to market a computer, primarily because they were a monopoly. The didn't need to market their products in their primary area.
cdheer@reddit
They were no longer a monopoly in 1984.
TMWNN@reddit
/u/Ok_Programmer_4449 is correct. Everyone expected that the post-breakup AT&T would become the #1 rival to IBM (and the Japanese, the other perpetual bogeyman that everyone expected would shortly try to take over the industry). Instead, AT&T turned out to be pretty awful at selling computers and gave up after a decade of trying, even buying and selling NCR during that time.
/u/penkster , I look forward to seeing how your video covers this.
penkster@reddit (OP)
Thanks for the shoutout. I didn't dig into the marketing aspects of it, because, well, I'm an SRE, not a salesperson (ew). But you're 100% correct that AT&T wildly misunderstood the market when they designed and released this computer. In my endnotes I point out the primary reasons it failed. Anyone in marketing should have seen that list and gone "FFS, there's no way people are going to buy this." - but, sadly, if they did say something, it didn't stick.
Ok_Programmer_4449@reddit
For about 5 minutes at that point. They still had no experience trying to sell a product.
Lozerien@reddit
Too expensive and rough edges. You could buy a loaded PC-AT with a copy of Santa Cruz Xenix for half the price. Yes, was a pain porting 32 bit code to the wackadoodle segmented 16 bit CPU, but it could be done.
penkster@reddit (OP)
You mighe be underestimating the price of SCO Xenix. I worked on those as well, building x86 machines and running Xenix on them. The baseline OS could be gotten, but holy cow the cost of the compilers. It was bananas.
There were others too, I should probably do a video on them. Companies like Altos who built their entire brand on Xenix based multiuser machines running on 8086 CPUs. They were super-cool :)