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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting how the "common history" of the IBM PC is often "The 8086 came into existence and then later the 386 was released" as if they somehow were only separated by a few years.

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While we are talking about that, I actually have a PC running on an 80186 (rather uncommon, as it has peripherals built in that are not IBM PC compatible), running a XENIX descendant: SINIX.

It's a Siemens PC-D and it was a marvelous machine. Again, not fully compatible with IBM PCs, but often for good reason. The 640k barrier was not a thing on a PC-D for example. And it has its own MMU made of discrete logic chips for real process separation on SINIX!

The HP Palmtop ran a 186 chip - not sure if it used any of the 186 specific instructions.

The extra instructions were mostly fine, the NEC V20/V30 implemented them too, the 186 had built-in peripheral functions like timers and the interrupt controller that were different to those in a PC.

You couldn't use the array bound check instruction as it used the interrupt used by the PC BIOS for Print Screen.

That is a hilarious limitation. I can just see someone building a test program to try it out and wondering why his printer is suddenly spitting out screenshots.

I was going to say "that's now how it works", but actually, thinking about it... I think that's exactly what would happen, heh?

I’ve been trying to hunt down one of these machines for years. Does yours have the Collage GUI?

I have at least two, actually. Hopefully additionally the one that I originally used in the 80s (the other two are much more recent acquisitions) still exists in my parent's basement somewhere.

The machines are all in Europe and I'm currently in the US. Where are you based? I might be willing to part with one of the three machines, but only after I've gotten an extensive look at it (and it will likely be a significant while before that, especially with not being able to travel right now and all).

What's the Collage GUI?

EDIT: The GUIs I'm aware of are Digital Research GEM and Windows, I think up to Windows 2.11 or something. Obviously, that's for DOS. If there was a GUI for SINIX, I'd be extremely interested? I noticed that the SINIX 1.2 kernel added graphics support.

I’m in Dublin, Ireland.

Collage was a GUI I used a little that ran on SINIX. It wasn’t as nice as GEM but I could run programs and browse files. I think I could run a windowed terminal.

This seems interesting. I couldn't find anything on Collage, other than a note in a German SINIX manual [1] to the extent that this was a GUI used by Siemens before they switched to X Windows and OSF/Motif.

Does anyone know, if there is any documentation out there, or maybe even screenshots?

[1] "UNIX für den kommerziellen Einsatz: Die SINIX-Anwendungsumgebung" ed. John J. Abbott (Carl Hanser Verlag München Wien, 1993), PDF-copy: http://oldcomputers-ddns.org/public/pub/rechner/siemens/mx-r...

I never knew this was a thing. I compared the kernel (like, actually reading and comparing the disassembly) between SINIX 1.0 and SINIX 1.2, and I noticed that in 1.2 a significant amount of kernel code for graphics support was added. I did wonder what that was for.

Now I'm super intrigued that there may actually be a GUI for the PC-D/X[1] out there!

I'm pretty sure the installation of SINIX 1.2 does not have that, it probably came on extra diskettes, but now I really want to double check.

[1] The machine was basically called PC-D when running DOS, and PC-X when running SINIX. That's not technically true for the first revisions of the boards (where e.g. the MMU was an optional card), but all PC-Ds I remember seeing even had "PC-D/X" written on their backside already.

EDIT: That book you linked seems to be for the SVR4 SINIX that came after the XENIX-based PC-D SINIX. By that time, from what I could tell from other research so far, SINIX was running on NS32032, not on 186.

Oh, I found a screenshot and some more information! Page 111 of this:

http://oldcomputers.dyndns.org/public/pub/rechner/siemens/mx...

I think Siemens 97801 is another moniker for Siemens PC-X (at least the SINIX kernel also calls it 9780).

Yes, there are actually several screenshots (or rather, hardcopies of screens) in this.

Thank you!

No, thank you! This is something I didn't even know existed, and now I'm very curious to find out more. Although chances are slim, maybe that software turns up somewhere someday (it would be brilliant if it's on one of the machines I got, since except for the one that was my own in the 80s, I did not get to even see them yet--shipping them over the ocean would not just have been expensive, but risky, too).

If it’s there, please preserve and document it. There’s very little left of it anywhere else.

Of course. I found some other stuff in the 1.2 kernel by the way, like the existence of (relatively smart, apparently) network and serial multiplexer cards for the PC-X.

I also reverse engineered how the NMI worked, details about the MMU etc.

I've published a few screenshots at the Retrocomputing Forum, https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/a-bit-of-xenix-history/186...

The 97801 was only a - very nice and ergonomic - serial text terminal (some models were VT220 compatible), but it was commonly used with SINIX systems. It seems that Siemens provided a 97801 emulator for Collage (https://www.computerwoche.de/a/siemens-macht-sich-mit-collag...).

My bad, I looked into my notes again, the Siemens PC-X was the Siemens 9781.

If I understand correctly the docs we found, there were 3 "flavors": "Grafik-COLLAGE", "Alpha-COLLAGE", and "X-COLLAGE". I assume the first would be for some sort of clever terminal, the second for non-graphical terminals, and the last one for X servers.

At the time I thought it was odd that the windows ended up aligning at character cell borders, which would indicate a terminal with some form of redefinable character set.

What you are saying is true, but it's also worth keeping in mind that the 8086 was already three years old by the time the first IBM showed up, and the 286 was launched only a few months after the IBM PC.

That was part of the reason why the 286 ended up with the "braindead chip" reputation - it was designed before the IBM PC and DOS showed up, and thus the inability to easily switch between real and protected mode was not seen as a big problem at the time it was designed.

Exactly - the winning OS was MS-DOS and successors and so the 8086 went to the 80386 because nothing "famous" really used the 286 capabilities (Windows 286 aside).

I think what people tend to miss is that it took a very long time for that to happen. It took until the early 90s for the 386 to get cheap enough to start outselling the 286. Even after Intel dropped it, AMD and Harris kept releasing versions that were faster and cheaper than the low-end 386es.

Yes, my 386SX 20Mhz with hopping 2MB and a 40MB HDD was about 1 500 euros in 1990, when the minimum wage was around 300 euros.

It was bought via credit and if I make the inflation calculation for today's money it would be a big pile of notes.

And that would be obsolete by 1994.

Yep, bought a Pentium 66 MHz in 1995 with 8 MB, around the same price.

Same machine, investment was so big that my dad had to ask for a payroll advance from his boss, given I was struggling with Pascal (and my then computer was a Vic20). Turns out the boss had studied in the same college I was in, his answer was: "Whatever your kid need".

And that's how I got my hands on a 386sx. Around 1992 I installed Xenix and became a Unix nerd.

I love you, dad.

And OS/2.

OS/2 was always tied to the 80286. Even 2.0 still used 16bit device drivers, and used the 16bit stuff at its core.

Oh, wow, I'd never put the timeline together like that. Yes, that makes the 286 make much more sense!

Well the first "PC-compatible" using a 386 came out only 5 years after the IBM PC. And the CPU itself came out only 7 years after the 8086. It really was only a few years!

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