A Quarter Century of Unix mentions Harris computers
Sam Leffler refers to Harris computers when he was working at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland (late ’70s):
Well [Bill] Shannon and I graduated. We ended up going through a bunch of projects. Case Western was trying to put in a campus-wide network. They were well ahead of their time. It was total politics. The committee and all the departments had agreed that they wanted DEC equipment, and some regent or chancellor or something came in and said: “You will buy Harris.” So we ended up with a lot of Harris equipment. Strangest equipment you’d seen in your life. Didn’t run Unix or anything. The equipment never worked. Well, Shannon and I were desperately looking for a project that had funding, ’cause we needed to get out. So we agreed to do a port to this machine. It was a very strange machine. So he did the operating system and I did the compiler work and all the language work. So we had this incestuous, uh, symbiotic relationship. One couldn’t graduate without the other, ’cause I needed the system to demonstrate my compiler, and he needed the compiler to get the system running.
In the end, you know, the Harris is a pretty fast machine. But it wasn’t byte-addressable and it had 24-bit words. We basically took PDP-11/70-class machine and changed it into an 11/34 with demand paging. We were in contact with Bill [Joy] and we had our system running before he did.
Source:
Salus, Peter. A Quarter Century of UNIX, 1995, p 168f.
They might have been Harris/3 computers (inferred from this bio.)
George Dively may have been the reason why they didn’t buy DEC’s.