12 Jul
2005
12 Jul
'05
11:24 p.m.
On Tue, 2005-07-12 at 19:51 +0100, Tony Duell wrote:
Ahhh... I didn't know the 3a was purely a Unix system...
(I knew about PNX - just thought that hardly anyone ran it on the 1 & 2
machines as everyone was running POS, and that was supposed to be the
primary OS for the systems)
Some PERQ-fanatics don't consider the 3a to be a real PERQ. After all,
it's got a single-chip processor running a fixed instruction set (and not
a board of chips with user-modifyable microcode), it's got an
optomechanical mouse (and not an electromagnetic tablet), it's got a SCSI
disk interface (and not a custom disk controller that can put filesystem
pointers in the sector headers), etc. The 3a is almost, but not quite
'yet another unix box'. Not quite because it does have a
user-microcodable processor -- the graphics one.
On the classic PERQs (1, 1a, 2T1, 2T2), there are several available OSes.
POS is single-tasking, but has the advantage of supporting user-written
microcode. PNX is unix with a windowing front end -- it's not bad, but why
get a PERQ and just run unix on it. There's also Accent, which I know
little about other than it's muiti-user and uses something close to the
POS filesystem.
-tony
Actually,
are we only counting machines that ran Unix-a-like systems, or
anything in the workstation class? (i.e. does PERQ qualify? :-)
And just how would you describe PNX?
It was available for the PERQ 1 and 2 machines (AFAIK there never was a
version for the PERQ 2T4, and the 68020-based PERQ 3a ran nothing else).