On Thu, 24 Oct 2024, Doug Jackson via cctalk wrote:
  Yes, UUCP was literally a thing, but UNIX was
unobtanium in the early
 computing eral - The world of the University Minicomputer.
 It certainly wasn't even vaguely accessible by a hobbyist running a
 Z80 or 6800 in the late 70's.
 I vividly remember being able to take home a NEC 80386 computer from
 my day job (I worked for a computer store selling NEC machines) during
 the Christmas shutdown between 1987/1988 - It had SCO Xenix installed
 and a new graphical system (To SCO) called 'XWindows'   Unheard of - I
 did a heap of learning.
 That was probably the point where a UNIX like operating system became
 accessible to people. Then 386BSD arrived (1993) and Linux came (1991)
 into the scene and suddenly unix was everywhere - I still remember my
 first stack of installation media for freeBSD - something like 10
 1.4MB floppies for the Binaries, and another 10 for the source files.
 So - yea, UUCP was around, but it wasn't alive in hobbyist circles. 
 Very slightly before that (not by much), Xenix (Unix without the
 trademark royalties, and peddled by MICROS~1) could run on a 80286.
 Bill Gates said that the 80286 was "brain dead". (possibly due to the
 difficulty of switching back and forth to "protected mode") The 80386,
 and even the 80386SX, was a very welcome step.