23 Feb
1998
23 Feb
'98
2:46 p.m.
On Sat, 21 Feb 1998, John Foust wrote:
And I'll almost bet that that company was FORTUNE microsystems,
right?
But such a blast from the past! I didn't think anybody
remembered those SSB 68000 based systems. I saw the ads years ago,
but I've never actually seen one of those.
Jeff
I think CP/M-68K was cross-compiled under Alcyon
C on a VAX 11/780.
(Alcyon also produced an OS called Regulus that was available
for Smoke Signal Broadcasting's 68000 systems.)
Wow, I thought I was the only one who had ever heard of Alcyon. FWIW,
they OEM'd their compiler from Greenhills, who are still in business. I
remember cracking passwords on our Regulus box (for some semi-legitimate
reason that escapes me). It's not supposed to be possible to decrypt
standard DES Unix passwords (programs like crack don't decrypt, they just
guess at passwords), but Alcyon apparently had a programmer who thought
that his encryption scheme was just as good as DES (it wasn't).
We put Regulus on a 68K-based luggable in 1985 (perhaps the first portable
Unix workstation?), but the company ran out of cash before production
fully ramped.
-- Doug