6 May
1998
6 May
'98
2:35 p.m.
At 02:12 PM 5/3/98 -0400, you wrote:
<To my knowledge no flavor of unix runs on anything
less than a 32-bit
<processor. There's a unix-workalike for the C-64/128, but that's not
Your knowledge is limited. Unix was started and lived for years on
PDP-11s (a 16 bit machine) in the form of V5, V6, V7 and 2.9BSD and
2.11BSD. I may add it was on other machines like the Interdatas.
I have heard tell (from a very reliable source) of a version of Unix
written for the Radio Shack Model 100 (8085, 32K max). (And no, it's not
available, and yes, he's tried to get the company that did it to release it.)
I thought someone had said that CP/M was based on Unix? Or was that one
of the PDP opsys?
I find the idea of not less than 32bits, 200mhz cpus
and large memory
being a must to be patently retrorevisionist to the history of what was
done before those things were available.
Yep.
--------------------------------------------------------------------- O-
Uncle Roger "There is pleasure pure in being mad
roger(a)sinasohn.com that none but madmen know."
Roger Louis Sinasohn & Associates
San Francisco, California http://www.sinasohn.com/
6 May
6 May
5:50 p.m.
New subject: Low-end Unix (was: TI99: Anyone reading this with a TI-99/4A?)
At 09:35 PM 06-05-98 -0500, Uncle Roger wrote:
At 02:12 PM 5/3/98 -0400, you wrote:
><To my knowledge no flavor of unix runs on anything less than a 32-bit
><processor. There's a unix-workalike for the C-64/128, but that's not
>
>Your knowledge is limited. Unix was started and lived for years on
>PDP-11s (a 16 bit machine) in the form of V5, V6, V7 and 2.9BSD and
>2.11BSD. I may add it was on other machines like the Interdatas.
To be strictly correct, the original version of Unix was written (in
assembler) for a Digital PDP-7 which was an 18bit computer. It was later
rewritten in B and then C which allowed a reasonably easy port to PDP-11s,
where it lived for a long while.
I thought someone had said that CP/M was based on Unix?
Or was that one
of the PDP opsys?
CP/M looks at the user level almost exactly as RT-11 does, so my guess is
that RT-11 was the inspiration for CP/M.
Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies(a)latrobe.edu.au
Information Technology Services | Phone: +61 3 9479 1550 Fax: +61 3 9479
1999
La Trobe University | "If God had wanted soccer played in the
Melbourne Australia 3083 | air, the sky would be painted green"
7 May
7 May
5:05 p.m.
Uncle Roger wrote:
At 02:12 PM 5/3/98 -0400, you wrote:
Somebody may have ported something similar to OS-9 the Mod 100, but
no way this side of Hell would it run anything like a real Unix --
even Radio Shack's first Xenix had a 70k kernel. A set of Unix-like
commands, that's not impossible though hard to implement in a machine
with interpretive BASIC as its core OS. Look at the MKS toolkit of
Unix utilities for MS-DOS -- they ran just fine on a 256k Tandy 2000.
which demonstrates that they used standard system calls and vectors
instead of the calls to specific IBM hardware locations that seemed
necessary to most MS-DOS programmers.
<To my knowledge no flavor of unix runs on
anything less than a 32-bit
<processor. There's a unix-workalike for the C-64/128, but that's not
Your knowledge is limited. Unix was started and lived for years on
PDP-11s (a 16 bit machine) in the form of V5, V6, V7 and 2.9BSD and
2.11BSD. I may add it was on other machines like the Interdatas.
I have heard tell (from a very reliable source) of a version of Unix
written for the Radio Shack Model 100 (8085, 32K max). (And no, it's not
available, and yes, he's tried to get the company that did it to release it.) I thought someone had said that CP/M was based on
Unix? Or was that one
of the PDP opsys?
Gary based the command set and most utilities he did on RT-11 -- and
some parts of Unix share that ancestry. MS-DOS, originally cloned
from CP/M, gained a lot of imports from Unix with v2.0
because of the
Xenix project.
>I find the idea of not less than 32bits, 200mhz
cpus and large memory
>being a must to be patently retrorevisionist to the history of what was
>done before those things were available.
These things are only a "must" to run the bloated applications that
keep showing up simply because the new machines can run them.
--
Ward Griffiths
They say that politics makes strange bedfellows.
Of course, the main reason they cuddle up is to screw somebody else.
Michael Flynn, _Rogue Star_
5:21 p.m.
Ward Griffiths wrote:
Somebody may have ported something similar to OS-9 the
Mod 100, but
no way this side of Hell would it run anything like a real Unix --
even Radio Shack's first Xenix had a 70k kernel.
To quote Dennis Ritchie: "On the PDP-7 UNIX system everything was written in
assembly language... we only had 4k words of memory for user programs on the
PDP-7..."
Clearly, a Model 100 would have been a much more powerful system for hosting
the first version of UNIX. Even the PDP-11 that eventually replaced the
PDP-7 could address at most 64k. I guess that must have been a way on the
OTHER side of Hell.
-----------------------------
Claudio Puviani
ClaudioPuviani(a)sprintmail.com
9726
days inactive
9728
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ClaudioPuviani＠sprintmail.com -
gram＠cnct.com -
H.Davies＠latrobe.edu.au -
sinasohn＠ricochet.net