9 Jan
1999
9 Jan
'99
4:57 a.m.
Allison J Parent said...
|They had no incentive to improve it and cpm1.4 was actually
|behind V2.2 (then current!).
They did have incentive, they just didn't recognize it.
|<For crying out loud, the first versions of UNIX ran on
|<minis that didn't have any more memory space than micros.
|<(OK, so they had 16 bit processors, I know. So did the
|<PC! Sort of...)
|
|Unix had been on DEC pdp-11s for years when the Altair
|rolled out. It was a $24,000 source license and even though
|the PDP-11 is 16 bit the instuction set, memory managment and
|disks were about 10 years ahead of the PC. Unix wanted memory
|and it wanted a hard disk of some size to work well.
My point is that the concepts were known. It's not like
it required a brilliant flash of intuition to think of
multitaksing or longer file names - they were around in
the low end world of minis, right next door.
|What si forgotten is the path to unix(linux etal) was via C
|language for micros.
Actually, C was starting to catch on. But I wasn't advocating
UNIX, just the concepts. And asembler (or FORTRAN, for that
matter) would have worked fine for those.
|This was the early to mid 80s where the PC went from
|XT to AT, DOS to desktops and integrated applications and the z80
|was still giving them a hard run for the money.
Again, the concepts were there. Someone produced a
VMS CLI for the AT. It gave you multitasking, multiple
simultaneous users via the serial ports, and a bunch of
the VMS commands. I don't recall whether it did anything
for the filesystem (probably not, or maybe as an option).
For $99, it was the deal of the year. Unfortunately,
it didn't really get anywhere. (But I think the company
went on to make UNIX utilities for DOS/Windoze).
|Graphics we know were not going to happen on PDP11 or most other
|16bit cpus as they don't address enough space. OSs were driven by
|the environment and it's tasks plus space needs.
In the early 80s, you could do a lot with a Hercules card, a
Cromemco, etc. There were also all sorts of graphics systems
you could attach from a variety of vendors. While it was easier
on, say, VMS, you could still do a lot with a micor or a PDP (or
DG, whatever).
-Miles
My favorite ad was the Cromemco ad pointing out that the DG
ad supposedly smashing a competiror's mini's board was really
a Cromemco S100 board...