Banyan Systems - Porting VINES To An Intel 80286-based Version of SVR3

Porting VINES To An Intel 80286-based Version of SVR3

In 1986 the corporation recognized that the IBM PC-AT architecture had become an industry standard, and that lack of VINES support for an industry standard PC server architecture was limiting its sales capabilities, and began work on porting VINES to an Intel 80286-based version of SVR3. The new version of VINES was released in early 1987 as VINES/286; however, in what was the first of numerous marketing blunders, Banyan deliberately limited the functionality of VINES/286 relative to the version that ran on the BNS. David Mahoney and the marketing department believed that similar capabilities would cannibalize sales of the expensive and high-profit BNS hardware. There was also concern that the software only product would drive up support calls due to inconsistencies of the 286 and 386 hardware at that time.