[rbanffy]

My impression is that they all built desktop minicomputers possible thanks to CPUs like the 68K but moved on to RISC designs when the 68K started showing its age. I would not say the PA-RISC was open, but SPARC had multiple sources and MIPS showed up everywhere. At that period, the x86 was not an option - Sun tried.

[ncmncm]

Apollo was building bit-slice 68000 emulations (to have an MMU) into the mid '80s, and ran Aegis, their homegrown fully-networked GUI OS, coded in their home-grown Pascal, with their home-grown touchpad pointer and home-grown token-ring network, on those and on actual 68K into the late '80s.

Aegis was inspired by MULTICS, not Unix, and was definitely a better system. They were demand-paging across the network in the early '80s.

One feature I recall stood out: they expanded environment variables in symbolic link text, like /usr/bin -> /usr/$SYSTEM/bin to get a SYSV or BSD Unix flavor, later on. The only Unix that does something similar I know of is Dragonfly.

[rbanffy]

> Aegis was inspired by MULTICS, not Unix, and was definitely a better system. They were demand-paging across the network in the early '80s.

I’d love to see one of those operating. We have lost so many great ideas we seem to never revisit…

[ncmncm]

Another was a read() system call that would copy into a caller-supplied buffer if it had to, but would normally just return a pointer into its buffer cache.

[ncmncm]

I know somebody who has some. You sort of need more than one so the token has somewhere to go.