Since we are proposing alternatives... There is a port of Venix (SVR2-ish Unix variant targeted for RT use) for the 8086 and 80286 PC-type machines. I reeeeally vaugly recall the 8086 version ran in 512KB of memory. It was a pretty decent system for the time; Xenix makes me itch. Where you would find Venix/86 or Venix/286 these days, I have no idea. Someone has Venix for the DEC Pro on-line, so anything is possible. If you aren't tied to Unix-like systems, earlier versions of OS/2 did very useful things on i286 machines. Ken