Running different OSes on classic hardware (Re: Re installing XP on Sony)

On Sun, 6 Mar 2005 13:51:32 -0500, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote: It depends upon why you are collecting, I suppose, and what you are doing with the machines you collect. I tend to collect machines for the fun of figuring out what makes them tick, and you can learn a lot by porting an OS to a new machine. You can also learn a lot by upgrading a machine to the max. You learn boatloads by designing new hardware for an old machine. For example, I'm planning my next "just for fun" project. I've got a Tandy 6000HD (The follow-on to the TRS-80 Model 16B, i.e. a Model 2 chassis with a 68000 board). At one point these were the most common UNIX systems in existence, but now they're fairly hard to find. They run Microsoft Xenix. You can put a whole megabyte of DRAM in them. They have a 15MB HDD and an 8" floppy. There were rumors of an Arcnet card for these things. The development kit is crappy, the editors are worse, and there's no hint of software to be found online for this beast. So what am I going to do? First, build a memory board for the thing. 1MB isn't enough. DIP DRAMS are hard to come by, but I've got a box load of 8MB 72 pin SIMMs. Add a gate array for decoding, and I may have the fattest 6000 on the planet. Of course Tandy Xenix won't support the extra memory, so I'll need to port some other UNIX. There's no memory management hardware, so it'll have to be one of the embedded linices or Minix, I suppose. Just figuring out how to get the 68000 to talk to the Z80 for I/O will be a trick. The next problem would be the hard drive. I suppose that I could build an IDE interface, or I could just get a larger MFM drive.... Then there's building an ethernet card. Does it destroy the 'classicalness'? Maybe. But what's the point of having these things if they're just going to sit in a closet? Eric