Wang IN/ix

This was my first UNIX system, I was given "Workstation" with this in the mid to late 80s.

This was a 16bit full UNIX based upon Interactive UNIX. I thought it was great and learned a lot by using it.

It was a pretty neat system, max memory was 1M and you could do a lot with the system. For example, what follows is one Item I prototyped on IN/ix. Developing and testing C on a Wang VS was rather tough to do.

I decided to prototype create a multi-level BOM explosion prototype in C. I did this to learn C and UNIX, at that time I started to realize this prototype could benefit the Standard Cost Process.

Afterwards I used it to replace the current explosion on the Wang VS, this greatly reduced execution speed. The old version could take 3+ days to do a full explosion of all products for re-costing, the c version took 3 hours. It was so fast me and others could not believe it. So we did a many parallel tests and compared the results to be sure it was working.

The main reason for the big performance increase was c recursion, you could easily walk the BOM tree without a big memory foot print. In COBOL, without recursion, lots of memory and logic was spent trying to find the next component. Some BOMs were over 5 levels deep. Also one more thing, after a day or two, it was common for the old COBOL Program to crash on memory.

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$Id: inix.gmi,v 2.3 2023/10/17 14:44:45 jmccue Exp $