"Apple II" cannot really be cited as being wrong. I've never seen "Apple 2". The stylized versions, such as "Apple ][" are best left to those not having serious literary ambitions. My .02, Chuck

But most of the rest isn't worth it. ;-) -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Of course I run NetBSD. ---------------------------------------------------- (dodging tomatoes from VMS, Alpha Micro, DOS, Windows, VM/CMS, AS/400, ...)

Zane H. Healy wrote: Well I can bad mouth the C64 ... to my knowlage they never had a OS just Basic in ROM like Coco's and assorted other fruit flavored computers. You think BASIC rather than some OS for the above 8 bit micros.

Rumor has it that woodelf may have mentioned these words: Ah... but as of '82 or so, you could purchase a Unix-like OS for the CoCo that ran in 64K called OS-9 from MicroWare. People are speaking about writing "Unix for 6502" -now-... What about then? Admittedly, it took a fair investment in hardware, but anything back then that could run a multiuser multiprocessing OS generally did. IMHO, C64 = toy. Honestly, one damn fun toy! As toys, they *rocked!* Played Zork on it with a buddy for many an hour way back when. Graphics were great, sounds were awesome, Basic language *sucked*, peripherals were fairly expensive & damn slow. Basic CoCo = toy, and a crappy one at that. Most games sucked & were very expensive, peripherals were even more expensive, but awfully fast. At least the extended Basic didn't *completely* suck. Put enough money into a good printer, floppy drive, OS-9, languages that didn't suck (Basic09 didn't come bundled with OS-9L1 then) and you had a system with the power that a C64 couldn't touch... but the games still sucked[1]. ;-) [1] Until the CoCo3 - Rogue rocked on the CoCo; sucked on the IBM, didn't exist on the C64. There was a game called Micro[mumble] Mission[2] or somesuch - I remember reading a review where they compared the CoCo vs. IBM versions (dunno if they released it for the C64) - the CoCo version got 8/10, the IBM 3/10. If it came out for the C128, it prolly would've gotten a 10/10. ;-) [2] You were a "miniaturized doctor" in a little capsule traversing the bloodstream of a body healing illnesses & fighting bacteria & viruses; too many margaritas tonite to really remember a game I never had & hadn't even tried to remember for over 1.5 decades... ;-) If you haven't noticed: Lumping the CoCo with the C64... well... thems is fightin' words to some! ;-) Laterz, Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Bugs of a feather flock together." sysadmin, Iceberg Computers | Russell Nelson zmerch at 30below.com |

Lance Lyon wrote: I don't think Unix 128 is multi-tasking. I'm not sure, though, because it didn't run in VICE or MESS when I last tried (does anyone know if there is an emulator that can run it?). I think it is something like a Unixish "shell" written in BASIC. There is also LUnix/LNG, which is a full multitasking operating system for the C64 and C128 which resembles a Unix (although it isn't quite what I would consider a true Unix).

woodelf wrote: Define "change"? LUnix and BOS (unfinished multitasker from the creator of ACE), as well as my BRIX could "change" zpage and stack on a 6502. It took either using the REU DMA or simply copying the page to another location in memory, but it worked. Jim

So use the 128. The MMU will do that for you 'for real'. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Do not use for personal hygiene. -- Actual label, toilet brush -------------

Rumor has it that woodelf may have mentioned these words: Don't blame the computer for something that's due to bad coding on the part of the programmer. ;-) Straight outta the ROM, one way, 9600 baud was *no* problem - I ran my Epson printer at that, and that made graphics "Fly." (for weird values of "Fly" but hey, it was one heckuva lot faster than 300/600 baud). I tried overclocking my serial->parallel converter & doing 19200, but the converter had issues... not the CoCo. You should see what they're doing *now* with the CoCo's bitbanged port! 115200 on a CoCo3 and 57600 on a non-overclocked CoCo1/2 for a product called "DriveWire." Head over to http://www.cloud9tech.com - I'm just a very satisfied customer. It's a tad slower (but not much so) than a standard floppy, but the ability of keeping your entire floppy (and emulated hard drive) library on a PC is wicked fun. A guy by the name of Roger Taylor of http://www.coco3.com fame has said that he's now gotten 115200 reliably on a CoCo2! His product (which should make lots of us oldsters happy, not just the CoCo fanbois ;-) is the Rainbow IDE (for Integrated Development Environment - not the hard drives) - it's a sweet environment for coding for any classic machine that can be run in M.E.S.S., speeding up development time by a few orders of magnitude. Write your code, click one button & the IDE assembles/compiles your code, formats a virtual floppy (or ROM), starts M.E.S.S. & mounts the floppy or ROM and in the immortal word of Emeril: "Bam!" Pair that with Drivewire to test your software on a real CoCo without having to format floppies... Schweet! Check out the "Jewelled" proggie for the CoCo3 he's writing... Laterz, Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Profile, don't speculate." SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers | Daniel J. Bernstein zmerch at 30below.com |

Yes, but you can still swap them in software. This involves a (relatively) expensive copy operation, but things like REUs make that easy to stomach; the REC could even be thought of as a 'stealth MMU' (even though it's not really remapping anything, its fast copy/swap achieves a similar effect). Or you can go the software 6502 approach. But I wouldn't know anything about that. ;-) -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- LET'S GO FORWARD ... INTO THE PAST! ----------------------------------------

On Monday 03 March 2008, Zane H. Healy wrote: Lots of DEC stuff runs UNIX just fine. :) Pat -- Purdue University Research Computing --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/ The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org

I have to stir the pot a little now and then. ;-) Yet there's endless fascination in the Commodore 8-bit community with writing the next "Unix" for it. A good single-tasking system with proper memory protection or even true virtual memory would be a better goal. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- The cost of living has not adversely affected its popularity. --------------

On Mon, 3 Mar 2008, Sridhar Ayengar wrote: Even Windoze can't stop us from creating files with "invalid" filenames. You can also create a file named *.* (getting rid of it may be harder)

On Monday 03 March 2008 20:08, Sridhar Ayengar wrote: No you can't. The only two characters you can't have in a filename are "/" and NUL, as far as the kernel is concerned. Of course, you can have a "\", but that's properly called a "backslash" not a "slash". :) I ran into this problem at work once; the HSM we use exports itself as an nfs share, and through timezone settings it didn't like, "/" got inserted into filenames that it automatically generated when useres deleted files. I can site a reference even (though a different one than I remember looking at when I was trying out how to fix the HSM): http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/faq/part2/section-2.html I can't think of any UNIX(-alike) kernel that wouldn't interpret a "/" passed to it in a filename as a directory separator. The only way to get around this is to go around the kernel and poke at the filesystem (or filesystem drivers) yourself, to convince them to shoot you in the foot. Pat -- Purdue University ITAP/RCAC --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/ The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org

Sridhar Ayengar wrote: Unix filenames can't have slashes in them (everything except slash and null is allowed). All Unices that I know of would interpret a path with slashes in it as a path with subdirectories, not a filename.

timr at slop:~$ touch \/path touch: cannot touch `/path': Permission denied timr at slop:~$ uname -a Linux slop 2.6.24-timriker #1 SMP Sun Feb 17 01:36:19 MST 2008 i686 GNU/Linux which *nix are you on? just curious. -- Tim Riker - http://Rikers.org/ - TimR at Debian.org Embedded Linux Technologist - http://eLinux.org/ BZFlag maintainer - http://BZFlag.org/ - for fun!

Rumor has it that Tim Riker may have mentioned these words: I was too, because it didn't work on this either: Linux mail.30below.com 2.4.20-8 #1 Thu Mar 13 17:18:24 EST 2003 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux Maybe 2.2? Now you've given me one heckuva reason to spark up the latest Vcc (that's not +5v, it's the latest virtual CoCo[1] from David Keil) & try it on OS-9. [1] http://vcc6809.bravehost.com/ Yea, a lame attempt at bringing it ontopic, but at least it was an attempt! ;-) Laterz, "Merch" -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers zmerch at 30below.com What do you do when Life gives you lemons, and you don't *like* lemonade?????????????

Tim Riker wrote: AIX Peace... Sridhar

Cameron Kaiser wrote: Doesn't work for me as a regular user. I get: $ touch \/path touch: /path: Permission denied As root, it works, but it creates a file called "path" in the root directory, not a file called "/path" in the current directory. Escaping the slash doesn't change its meaning, since the handling of slashes is done by the kernel (or equivalent), not the shell (backslash only makes the shell treat special characters as literal characters).

Well, I take this back. I'm not able to duplicate it now, so I'm not sure what's changed. FWIW, it's tcsh and Tiger on an HFSJ filesystem. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- If you had any brains at all, you'd be dangerous. --------------------------

There's been a lot of sloppy terminology floating around in this thread, and have some little expertise in the area - I've been doing system programming, on each side of the user/kernel divide, for decades, and I wrote my own user-land code to read a popular Unix filesystem.... "Filename" is an ambiguous term. The Unix file APIs traditionally have exactly two special byte values: 0x00 and '/'. The former is a string terminator; the latter is a pathname component separator. While it can look sort of as though you can use a / in pathnames by creating directories, it's a rather poor emulation; put a slash at the beginning or end of your "filename", or try to use two consecutive slashes as distinct from just one, and the fiction that you're using a / as just another character in a filename falls apart fast. That said, there _are_ some circumstances under which some systems will let a / sneak into a pathname component at some level. Some NFS server implementations do not do such checking, depending on the client to do it if it's to be done at all, and NFS clients that aren't traditional Unices can "offend" in this regard. (The example I've usually seen cited is Macs from the HFS days, before OS X moved to Unix APIs; they used : as a pathname separator, with / as an ordinary character. I've seen it said that more recent NFS clients for them swap : and / in the client code to avoid exactly this problem with Unix NFS servers.) But such "filenames" aren't usable on the server even when created, since the Unix APIs generally treat / as a pathname separator rather than a pathname component character, even when pathname components containing slashes exist. (You can get them out, with things like ls, but anything that passes string pathnames into the kernel can't touch them. Some systems have APIs, designed for use by things like NFS servers, that can let you at them, but they're difficult to use and usually require privileged access anyway.) It would be possible to design an alternative API, such something based on counted lists of counted strings, that did not have any reserved octet values. This could work to a point, but code that used the additional capabilities this provided would produce on-disk data not usable through the older APIs. Backslashes are not special to the filesystem in any Unix I know of. But they *are* special to the shell; to pick an example I've seen mentioned upthread, "touch \/path" to most shells is equivalent to just "touch /path", because the \ is treated by the shell as quoting the /, which doesn't do anything because / is not special to the shell. (By the time touch gets the pathname and passes it off to the kernel, the quoting has been lost; touch has no way to tell that the / was quoted at the shell level.) If you double the \ to get it past the shell, or you use some interface to which \ is not special, then \/path is a thing named "path" in a directory named "\", just as a/bcde is a thing named "bcde" in a directory named "a". /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

There is, actually: the API doesn't permit it. Unless your "filenames" means pathnames (rather than pathname components), in which case it's true but trivially uninteresting. Some systems have APIs (or other interfaces, such as the NFS server network interface) that permit getting a slash into a pathname component, but to the extent that that's possible, I don't think it's fair to call them Unix, because the Unix filesystem APIs all treat slashes as pathname component separators. What OSes are you two using, and how are you creating these "filenames" containing slashes? Whatever they are, in this respect, they certainly aren't "Unix". /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On Mon, 3 Mar 2008, Mr Ian Primus wrote: Or, you could create a major flame war, by calling it "the first personal computer" :-)

John Floren wrote: In one respect the apple I was the first PC on the simple grounds it was the first computer I know of to use Dram.

On Mon, 3 Mar 2008, Josef Chessor wrote: followed by Antikytheria

On Mon, 3 Mar 2008, Jules Richardson wrote: Probably not even a Linux implementation!

Hi The Antikytheria could only single task while most large abacus' could multitask with ease. Dwight _________________________________________________________________ Shed those extra pounds with MSN and The Biggest Loser! http://biggestloser.msn.com/

On Monday 03 March 2008 16:25, Josef Chessor wrote: Some of us prefer the soroban to the abacus. :-) -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin

Not. :) g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.

Across the top of the Coleco Adam computer Keyboard they used roman numerals for the smart keys Chris On 3/3/08, Andrew Burton <aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote: