4 Apr
2007
4 Apr
'07
2:08 a.m.
Last year Woodelf posted a question wondering if a Z-machine could be
ported to the pdp8. Woodelf, did you get anywhere with that?
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
4 Apr
4 Apr
9:35 p.m.
David Griffith wrote:
Last year Woodelf posted a question wondering if a
Z-machine could be
ported to the pdp8. Woodelf, did you get anywhere with that?
The problem with a Z-Machine that memory, 32K bytes just covers the game
data. About 10k+ for the Z-machine and 8k+ for a OS. The PDP-8 just
does not have the memory.
8:49 p.m.
David Griffith wrote:
What about on an -8/a? I believe I've got a new 128k board for an -8/a, I
just don't have an -8/a.
Zane
Last year Woodelf posted a question wondering if
a Z-machine could be
ported to the pdp8. Woodelf, did you get anywhere with that?
The problem with a Z-Machine that memory, 32K bytes just covers the game
data. About 10k+ for the Z-machine and 8k+ for a OS. The PDP-8 just
does not have the memory. 
9:27 p.m.
On 4/4/07, Zane H. Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote:
What about on an -8/a? I believe I've got a new
128k board for an -8/a, I
just don't have an -8/a.
The you also need a KT8A to use the MSC8-DJ 128K memory card (or, IIRC
4 x 32K MSC8-AB boards). They are somewhat rare.
For the widest audience, I'd recommend a v3-compatible 12-bit
Z-Machine for 32K, and then, perhaps, tackle the v5 problem, perhaps
on a 128K -8/a.
For the record, I do have a KT8A and a 128K board (and the -8/a ;-),
but back when I was using them all on a daily basis, the best use I
had for the extra memory was a RAM disk. There just wasn't that much
software written to take advantage of the extra memory, so conversely,
not much was sold because it was difficult to find something to use
it. Couple that with the fact that the 128K expansion came late in
the PDP-8/a lifecycle, and it's not difficult to see why they aren't
common.
I've never seen those particular add-in boards in a machine in the
wild. I bought mine from DEC resellers.
-ethan
10:06 p.m.
From: "Ethan Dicks" <ethan.dicks at gmail.com>
On 4/4/07, Zane H. Healy <healyzh at
aracnet.com> wrote:
I believe I've got a KT8A or two, and even a working 8/A to put them in,
all within a few miles of Zane. (But I can't take on writing a z-machine
anytime soon.)
What about on an -8/a? I believe I've got a
new 128k board for an -8/a,
I
just don't have an -8/a.
The you also need a KT8A to use the MSC8-DJ 128K memory card (or, IIRC
4 x 32K MSC8-AB boards). They are somewhat rare. I've never seen those particular add-in boards in
a machine in the
wild. I bought mine from DEC resellers.
I bought a set from a fellow collector, but I've also seen them on
ePay from time to time. They don't seem as rare as I'd expected.
Vince
9:28 p.m.
On Wed, 4 Apr 2007, Zane H. Healy wrote:
One of the big things that allowed the Z-machine to run on machines of
limited memory was its virtual memory functionality. Most modern
implementations don't bother with this anymore.
What I'm really after is getting a V8 (V5 would be acceptable) Z-machine
working on my SBC6120.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
David Griffith
wrote:
What about on an -8/a? I believe I've got a new 128k board for an -8/a, I
just don't have an -8/a. Last year Woodelf posted a question wondering if
a Z-machine could be
ported to the pdp8. Woodelf, did you get anywhere with that?
The problem with a Z-Machine that memory, 32K bytes just covers the game
data. About 10k+ for the Z-machine and 8k+ for a OS. The PDP-8 just
does not have the memory.
5 Apr
5 Apr
5:25 a.m.
On 4/4/07, David Griffith <dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu> wrote:
One of the big things that allowed the Z-machine to
run on machines of
limited memory was its virtual memory functionality. Most modern
implementations don't bother with this anymore.
True. OTOH, it was a specialized VM implementation to solve only the
problem of how to handle a 96K-128K file in a machine that might have
48K total, prior to OS overhead (thinking of the TRS-80 and Apple II).
The initial Z-machine for the C-64 doesn't do any memory bank tricks,
leaving it much less free space than 48K (later interpreters are much
more elaborate). Years ago, I took the C-64 interpreter and patched
it to run on the VIC-20. I never ran it on the real hardware, but
when I stuffed RAM into every open orifice in the memory map
(including lofting the interpreter into cartridge ROM space), it
booted and ran numerous v3 games under VICE. If I had to estimate, I
had between 28K and 32K of RAM for the game, plus 6K of "ROM" for the
engine. 40K for the game, the rest of the machine could be taken up
with OS overhead, I/O registers, etc.
What I'm really after is getting a V8 (V5 would be
acceptable) Z-machine
working on my SBC6120.
Wow... with the pure memory requirements/capacities of the v5 and
larger game file formats, that's going to be difficult to juggle in
RAM. At least OS/8 has a low memory footprint when applications are
running.
For those that are still reading this thread and haven't delved into
the inner workings of a Z-machine...
http://www.gnelson.demon.co.uk/zspec/appd.html
-ethan
4 Apr
4 Apr
9:12 p.m.
On 4/4/07, woodelf <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca> wrote:
David Griffith wrote:
When you say "game data", do you mean the impure area? If so, I'd
agree for v5 games, but it's substantially less for v3 games - i.e.,
the ones that shipped for the Apple II and the TRS-80 and the C-64,
etc. The larger of the home 8-bitters could run some v5 games, but I
think 32K was the cutoff - machines that had 32K or less were never
asked to run v5 games.
Two years ago, I assisted Mike Riley, the author of ElfOS for the
1802, with a new from-scratch Z-machine. The basic platform was 1802
CPU, 32K of RAM, an IDE interface, and a few K of ROM for some OS
toolbox routines. The SpareTimeGizmos Elf2000 conforms to that
hardware requirements list, as does a machine built by Mike Riley
himself. We were able to get the RAM-resident portion of the OS, the
interpreter, and the impure area for a v3 game into that 32K with
about, IIRC, 1.5K left over to load pure (read-only) game file data
into. This lead to a lot of disk activity since there weren't enough
pages to keep the parser resident, but part of that difficulty is that
the page size of 512 bytes is double the page size of, say, a C-64
floppy, so when you only need one string or one subroutine from the
far end of the game, you end up flushing 512 bytes to grab the enw
stuff, and if it was a block with parser code, re-fetching that part
of the parser, back and forth.
It hasn't been effectively possible to write games in Inform for v3
for several revisions of the Inform library, but I think the compiler
can still emit v3 game files. It limits what one can run, but does
not mean that there are absolutely no files to use (or that it's
imposible to generate test game files to exercise parts of a z-machine
under test). The output from ScottFree is v3 compatible, and doesn't
use the libraries at all - the parser is so simple that ScottFree just
tacks it onto the reparsed Scott Adams egine statements when it builds
a game.
Having looked at the possibility of a 12-bit Z-Machine in the past, I
think it's tough, largely because the Z-Machine architecture is
optimized for an 8-bit (or 16-bit) host. Keeping track of what your
current virtual address is going to require a 24-bit pointer on the
PDP-8, even though only 18 bits or so of the pointer is ever going to
get populated. The integer math is all 16-bits, etc. Not a huge
amount of work on a 6502 or a Z-80, but plenty of extra humping for a
12-bitter. I'm not saying that makes it impossible, but it does make
it more difficult.
I'd love to see a 12-bit Z-machine interpreter, but I just haven't had
the time to work on it over the years. Instead, I've studied game
internals and written a few games from scratch in Inform. Still...
it'd be fun to play Zork I on the PDP-8, just for the staggering geek
potential.
-ethan
Last year Woodelf posted a question wondering if
a Z-machine could be
ported to the pdp8. Woodelf, did you get anywhere with that?
The problem with a Z-Machine that memory, 32K bytes just covers the game
data. About 10k+ for the Z-machine and 8k+ for a OS. The PDP-8 just
does not have the memory.
10:49 p.m.
Ethan Dicks wrote:
When you say "game data", do you mean the
impure area? If so, I'd
agree for v5 games, but it's substantially less for v3 games - i.e.,
the ones that shipped for the Apple II and the TRS-80 and the C-64,
etc. The larger of the home 8-bitters could run some v5 games, but I
think 32K was the cutoff - machines that had 32K or less were never
asked to run v5 games.
-ethan
Also a Z-machine requires a termial rather than a TTY.
5 Apr
5 Apr
5:09 a.m.
On 4/4/07, woodelf <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca> wrote:
Ethan Dicks wrote:
The Z-machine requires a terminal (sometimes called a "scope" in DEC
OSes, as in 'set tt scope') for the status line (number of turns
elapsed, score or time, name of present location...), but I do not
believe v3 games will choke if the status line directives are no-ops.
One could just belt out a stream of text interspersed with prompts,
much like the "SCRIPT" works when printing an ongoing session directly
to a printer.
In any case, plenty of PDP-8s had some sort of terminal instead of
just an ASR-33 TTY. My -8/L has 12K of core, and a PC04 high-speed
paper tape reader. I can load in the RIM and BIN loaders from it. I
don't have to have a TTY. In fact, to save paper, I do most of my
work on it from a VT220, plugging 20mA connection from the W076 right
into the back of the terminal, one of the best features, to me, of the
VT220. If only its VT52 emulation worked with TECO and the VTEDIT
MACRO.
When you say "game data", do you mean
the impure area? If so, I'd
agree for v5 games, but it's substantially less for v3 games - i.e.,
the ones that shipped for the Apple II and the TRS-80 and the C-64,
etc. The larger of the home 8-bitters could run some v5 games, but I
think 32K was the cutoff - machines that had 32K or less were never
asked to run v5 games.
-ethan
Also a Z-machine requires a termial rather than a TTY. From the VT8E to the VT50/VT52 to the VT100 and VT220,
it wasn't that
odd to see other consoles on a PDP-8 than a real ASR-33. The
trick
was how to go from the toggle-in RIM loader up to the application
level. My -8/e has a rope-core ROM board to boot OS/8 from TU56s. It
doesn't _have_ to have paper tape either. It has mass storage and a
boot strap. By the time the -8/a came out (1976), TTYs weren't an
essential requirement if one had floppies or some bootable hard disk.
Yes, there were still plenty of ASR-33s on PDP-8s, but that's not the
only way they came.
-ethan
7:28 a.m.
On Wed, 4 Apr 2007, woodelf wrote:
Ethan Dicks wrote:
Not true. Dumb Frotz simply emits text.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
When you say "game data", do you mean
the impure area? If so, I'd
agree for v5 games, but it's substantially less for v3 games - i.e.,
the ones that shipped for the Apple II and the TRS-80 and the C-64,
etc. The larger of the home 8-bitters could run some v5 games, but I
think 32K was the cutoff - machines that had 32K or less were never
asked to run v5 games.
-ethan
Also a Z-machine requires a termial rather than a TTY. 
4 Apr
4 Apr
9:14 p.m.
Well, there's always virtual memory. Back when I was in college we
had a PDP-12 and I *really* wanted an 11 to play with (things haven't
changed much!). So, I wrote a PDP-11 simulator that ran on the 8. It
used disk space on an RK01 hard drive for virtual memory and could
simulate a PDP-11 with up to 32k of memory on a PDP-8 with only 8k.
Of course, it wasn't very fast but it did run ODT-11 (sort of). I
still have a listing of it. Some day I'll try typing it in to see if
it will work on the SBC6120 system that I'm building.
On Apr 4, 2007, at 5:35 PM, woodelf wrote:
David Griffith wrote:
Last year Woodelf posted a question wondering if
a Z-machine could be
ported to the pdp8. Woodelf, did you get anywhere with that?
The problem with a Z-Machine that memory, 32K bytes just covers the
game
data. About 10k+ for the Z-machine and 8k+ for a OS. The PDP-8 just
does not have the memory.
10:01 p.m.
On Wed, 4 Apr 2007, David Betz wrote:
Well, there's always virtual memory. Back when I
was in college we
had a PDP-12 and I *really* wanted an 11 to play with (things haven't
changed much!). So, I wrote a PDP-11 simulator that ran on the 8. It
used disk space on an RK01 hard drive for virtual memory and could
simulate a PDP-11 with up to 32k of memory on a PDP-8 with only 8k.
Of course, it wasn't very fast but it did run ODT-11 (sort of). I
still have a listing of it. Some day I'll try typing it in to see if
it will work on the SBC6120 system that I'm building.
This sounds like it could be adapted for my purposes. Some things I'd
want to address:
1) Can you specify which pages to swap? For the Z-machine, one would
want to swap the game data first, then the interpreter (if at all).
2) Perhaps this emulator could be stripped down to to run one particular
program: Frotz compiled for pdp11.
3) Can the emulator be wrapped up with the only binary it will run? The
idea is to have a single Frotz binary for pdp8 to simplify distribution.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
5 Apr
5 Apr
4:30 a.m.
1) Can you specify which pages to swap? For the
Z-machine, one would
want to swap the game data first, then the interpreter (if at all).
I'm afraid I don't remember much about its architecture. I don't
think there was a way to "lock" pages into memory.
2) Perhaps this emulator could be stripped down to to
run one
particular
program: Frotz compiled for pdp11.
Probably.
3) Can the emulator be wrapped up with the only
binary it will
run? The
idea is to have a single Frotz binary for pdp8 to simplify
distribution.
The biggest problem is that it only exists as a paper listing at the
moment. I'm planning on typing it in once I get my SBC6120 working
(still have some parts on order). In any case, it was written using
PAL8 so it isn't a library that can be linked with other modules. I
guess that could be changed too. Are there PDP-8 cross development
tools available for modern machines?
5:01 a.m.
On 4/4/07, David Betz <dbetz at xlisper.com> wrote:
There was not. The interpreter peered at the game header and
determined at instantiation time what was pure and what was impure.
The game file layout was sort-of segmented. Once the interpreter
determined where the end of impure storage was in the game file, any
pages above that address in the game file could be overwritten in
memory without any repercussions.
This all went away with larger architectures like the 68000 and x86,
but for any small machine, where the 96Kbyte-128Kbyte game file
exceeds the target's physical memory, pure/impure demand-paging is how
Infocom did it, regardless of OS or instruction set.
-ethan
1) Can you
specify which pages to swap? For the Z-machine, one would
want to swap the game data first, then the interpreter (if at all).
I'm afraid I don't remember much about its architecture. I don't
think there was a way to "lock" pages into memory.
10:42 a.m.
1) Can you specify which pages to swap? For the
Z-machine, one
would
want to swap the game data first, then the
interpreter (if at all).
I'm afraid I don't remember much about its architecture. I don't
think there was a way to "lock" pages into memory. 
2:08 p.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
Did a copy of this x86 Mac OS ever leak out onto the net?
Curt
7:07 p.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
Did a copy of this x86 Mac OS ever leak out onto the
net?
Curt
To the best of my knowledge no. As far as I know this was never seeded to
developers.
OTOH, Rhapsody with the classic Mac OS interface was seeded. I forget if it
was DR2 or DR3 that first sported the Aqua interface, and the first
Developer release or two only ran on x86 boxes. The "Prelude to Rhapsody"
release first given out an the WWDC and then sent to developers was stock
OPENSTEP 4.2 and while intended to run on x86 could apparently also be
loaded on NeXT 68k systems as well as the correct HP PA-RISC or Sun Sparc
systems.
One of these days I'd really like to boot OPENSTEP on a Sparc 5. It should
just be a matter of finding the time. Which translates to finding an
actual reason to make the time. :^)
Zane
2:36 a.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
On Apr 5, 2007, at 5:54 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
I don't think there was ever a 68000 version of NT, even under
consideration. The initial development target was i860. When it
became obvious that wasn't going to work out, efforts went to...
I have a Fall '93 developer preview of NT 3.1 which has some text
files in the SDK which describe this piece of history. I was just
going to check if it wasn't the MC88000 that was briefly considered
as the primary target after i860, but before MIPS R4000 (which I
recall being the primary target for most of the development phase
before the first efforts to bring it up on ia32), but I seem to have
temporarily misplaced the disc.
ok
bear
Did a copy of
this x86 Mac OS ever leak out onto the net?
Don't think so.
. . . and what about the 68000 version of Windoze NT?
Was there a "deal" for mutual suppression? 
3:56 a.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
On 5 Apr 2007 at 19:36, r.stricklin wrote:
I don't think there was ever a 68000 version of
NT, even under
consideration. The initial development target was i860. When it
became obvious that wasn't going to work out, efforts went to...
I don't think 68K was ever a target. PPC and MIPS certainly were,
however. It could be that by the time of NT's release, the 68K
architecture was already considered to be pass?. I do recall that
NEC 980x was also one of the x86 targets.
I've got SDKs and DDKs for all releases of NT from 3.1 up through XP
(after which I lost interest). That includes international versions
of the same.
I really liked NT 3.51 and NT 4.0. Pretty darned stable and not too
bloated.
Cheers,
Chuck
4:10 a.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
At 7:36 PM -0700 4/5/07, r.stricklin wrote:
I have a Fall '93 developer preview of NT 3.1 which
has some text
files in the SDK which describe this piece of history. I was just
going to check if it wasn't the MC88000 that was briefly considered
as the primary target after i860, but before MIPS R4000 (which I
recall being the primary target for most of the development phase
before the first efforts to bring it up on ia32), but I seem to have
temporarily misplaced the disc.
Let's see NT supported x86, Alpha, MIPS, and what was the other
family? I want to say the 4th family was something from Sony, but
can't remember. Except for x86 the other three were basically one
vendor support I think (granted Alpha was a couple others).
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
4:32 a.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
On Apr 5, 2007, at 9:10 PM, Zane H. Healy wrote
Let's see NT supported x86, Alpha, MIPS, and what
was the other
family? I want to say the 4th family was something from Sony, but
can't remember. Except for x86 the other three were basically one
vendor support I think (granted Alpha was a couple others).
NT 3.51 added support for PowerPC.
ok
bear
8:43 a.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
Zane H. Healy wrote:
At 7:36 PM -0700 4/5/07, r.stricklin wrote:
There was PowerPC at some time or another too.
Peace... Sridhar
I have a Fall '93 developer preview of NT 3.1
which has some text
files in the SDK which describe this piece of history. I was just
going to check if it wasn't the MC88000 that was briefly considered as
the primary target after i860, but before MIPS R4000 (which I recall
being the primary target for most of the development phase before the
first efforts to bring it up on ia32), but I seem to have temporarily
misplaced the disc.
Let's see NT supported x86, Alpha, MIPS, and what was the other family?
I want to say the 4th family was something from Sony, but can't
remember. Except for x86 the other three were basically one vendor
support I think (granted Alpha was a couple others). 
1:32 p.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
Zane H. Healy wrote:
It still is. XBOX360 ;-)
Let's see NT supported x86, Alpha, MIPS, and
what was the other
family? I want to say the 4th family was something from Sony, but
can't remember. Except for x86 the other three were basically one
vendor support I think (granted Alpha was a couple others).
There was PowerPC at some time or another too.
5:12 p.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
WinNT was also available on AS/400's as I recall. I know Novell was too.
Curt
Zane H. Healy wrote:
At 7:36 PM -0700 4/5/07, r.stricklin wrote:
I have a Fall '93 developer preview of NT 3.1
which has some text
files in the SDK which describe this piece of history. I was just
going to check if it wasn't the MC88000 that was briefly considered
as the primary target after i860, but before MIPS R4000 (which I
recall being the primary target for most of the development phase
before the first efforts to bring it up on ia32), but I seem to have
temporarily misplaced the disc.
Let's see NT supported x86, Alpha, MIPS, and what was the other
family? I want to say the 4th family was something from Sony, but
can't remember. Except for x86 the other three were basically one
vendor support I think (granted Alpha was a couple others).
Zane
8:59 p.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
On Apr 6, 2007, at 10:12 AM, Curt @ Atari Museum wrote:
WinNT was also available on AS/400's as I recall.
I know Novell
was too.
Yeah, but only with the PC Integrated Server option, which was
basically a separate pentium PC on a PCI card, a la the SunPC or
Apple DOS Compatibility Card.
I hardly think that counts.
ok
bear
4:41 a.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
I thought it was an Intel 860... or something like that.
On 4/5/07, r.stricklin <bear at typewritten.org> wrote:
On Apr 5, 2007, at 5:54 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
I don't think there was ever a 68000 version of NT, even under
consideration. The initial development target was i860. When it
became obvious that wasn't going to work out, efforts went to...
I have a Fall '93 developer preview of NT 3.1 which has some text
files in the SDK which describe this piece of history. I was just
going to check if it wasn't the MC88000 that was briefly considered
as the primary target after i860, but before MIPS R4000 (which I
recall being the primary target for most of the development phase
before the first efforts to bring it up on ia32), but I seem to have
temporarily misplaced the disc.
ok
bear
--
--
d|i|g|i|t|a|l had it THEN. Don't you wish you could still buy it now!
pechter-at-gmail.com
Did a
copy of this x86 Mac OS ever leak out onto the net?
Don't think so.
. . . and what about the 68000 version of Windoze NT?
Was there a "deal" for mutual suppression?
4:42 a.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
Whoa... that's what I get while posting while sleeping.
I thought after the i860 was the NT for Mips and then Alpha.
Bill
On 4/6/07, Bill Pechter <pechter at gmail.com> wrote:
I thought it was an Intel 860... or something like that.
On 4/5/07, r.stricklin <bear at typewritten.org> wrote:
--
--
d|i|g|i|t|a|l had it THEN. Don't you wish you could still buy it now!
pechter-at-gmail.com
On Apr 5, 2007, at 5:54 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
I don't think there was ever a 68000 version of NT, even under
consideration. The initial development target was i860. When it
became obvious that wasn't going to work out, efforts went to...
I have a Fall '93 developer preview of NT 3.1 which has some text
files in the SDK which describe this piece of history. I was just
going to check if it wasn't the MC88000 that was briefly considered
as the primary target after i860, but before MIPS R4000 (which I
recall being the primary target for most of the development phase
before the first efforts to bring it up on ia32), but I seem to have
temporarily misplaced the disc.
ok
bear
--
--
d|i|g|i|t|a|l had it THEN. Don't you wish you could still buy it now!
pechter-at-gmail.com Did a
copy of this x86 Mac OS ever leak out onto the net?
Don't think so.
. . . and what about the 68000 version of Windoze NT?
Was there a "deal" for mutual suppression? 
9:38 a.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
Should be noted that somewhere on the Spansih language secion of the
Apple website, the original MacOS X Server release has screenshots
using the OS 8 theme.
On 4/5/07, Zane H. Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote:
Did a copy of
this x86 Mac OS ever leak out onto the net?
Curt
To the best of my knowledge no. As far as I know this was never seeded to
developers.
OTOH, Rhapsody with the classic Mac OS interface was seeded. I forget if it
was DR2 or DR3 that first sported the Aqua interface, and the first
Developer release or two only ran on x86 boxes. The "Prelude to Rhapsody"
release first given out an the WWDC and then sent to developers was stock
OPENSTEP 4.2 and while intended to run on x86 could apparently also be
loaded on NeXT 68k systems as well as the correct HP PA-RISC or Sun Sparc
systems.
One of these days I'd really like to boot OPENSTEP on a Sparc 5. It should
just be a matter of finding the time. Which translates to finding an
actual reason to make the time. :^)
Zane
2:23 p.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
The original MacOS X Server was a mutant OpenStep/MacOS hybrid, it looked
like a MacOS 8/9 themed OpenStep. I actually kind of liked it, not as slick
as the newer OSXes, but a bit more stable than the first couple of releases.
I've seen the super-alpha of Copland floating around the net...
On 4/6/07, Segin Noname <segin2005 at gmail.com> wrote:
Should be noted that somewhere on the Spansih language secion of the
Apple website, the original MacOS X Server release has screenshots
using the OS 8 theme.
4:57 p.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
Should be noted that somewhere on the Spansih language
secion of the
Apple website, the original MacOS X Server release has screenshots
using the OS 8 theme.
Did Mac OS X Server get released prior to the switch to Aqua? It very
likely did, I just don't remember as I didn't have a copy of the Server
software. That would also put the switch to Aqua later than I remembered
which is a distict possibility.
Personally I still hate Aqua, and long for the classic look and feel.
Though that does not stop me from using Mac OS X daily. :^) It is still
better than the alternatives.
Zane
7 Apr
7 Apr
3:39 a.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
On Apr 6, 2007, at 12:57 PM, Zane H. Healy wrote:
Did Mac OS X Server get released prior to the switch to Aqua? It very
likely did, I just don't remember as I didn't have a copy of the
Server
software. That would also put the switch to Aqua later than I
remembered
which is a distict possibility.
Personally I still hate Aqua, and long for the classic look and feel.
Though that does not stop me from using Mac OS X daily. :^) It is
still
better than the alternatives.
Zane
Yes is did. I remember running OSX Server on my Powerbook 3400. It
had an
OS 8 feel to it.
Rob
Robert Borsuk
irisworld at mac.com
--
(\__/)
(='.'=) This is Bunny. Copy and paste bunny into your
(")_(") signature to help him gain world domination.
6 Apr
6 Apr
2:29 p.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
Zane H. Healy wrote:
It sure was. I saw Mac OS X running on a 233MHz Pentium II at one of
our Seattle dev houses. This was back in 1999.
Obtaining it was a matter of:
1. Asking about it
2. Getting a denial that it existed
3. A week later, an anonymous package in brown paper showed up with some
unmarked CDs with no return address.
I swear I am not making any of that up.
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org)
World's largest electronic gaming project: http://www.MobyGames.com/
A delicious slice of the demoscene: http://www.MindCandyDVD.com/
Various oldskool PC rants and ramblings: http://www.oldskool.org/
Did a copy of
this x86 Mac OS ever leak out onto the net?
Curt
To the best of my knowledge no. As far as I know this was never seeded to
developers. 
7 Apr
7 Apr
2:41 a.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
> > Did a copy of this x86 Mac OS ever leak out
onto the net?
> To the best of my knowledge no. As far as I know
this was never seeded to
> developers.
It sure was. I saw Mac OS X running on a 233MHz
Pentium II at one of
our Seattle dev houses. This was back in 1999.
Star Trek isn't OS X, it was classic Mac OS, and was long dead before even
Rhapsody emerged. See Apple Confidential 2.0 for more than you ever wanted to
know about it.
--
--------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ ---
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- Corruptisima republica plurimae leges. -- Tacitus --------------------------
10 Apr
10 Apr
5:20 a.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
On 4/6/07, Cameron Kaiser <spectre at floodgap.com> wrote:
Star Trek isn't OS X, it was classic Mac OS, and was long dead before even
Rhapsody emerged. See Apple Confidential 2.0 for more than you ever wanted
to
know about it.
Star Trek project From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to:
navigation<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project#column-one>ne>,
search <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project#searchInput>
*For the science fiction media franchise, see Star
Trek<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek>
.*
*Star Trek* was the code name given to a
prototype<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype>project at Apple
Computer <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer> during 1992 and 1993.
Star Trek was to be a version of the
Macintosh<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS> operating
system <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system> which ran on
Intel<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel>-compatible
x86 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86> personal
computers<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_computer>(at that
time, the Mac
OS <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS> ran only on Apple's own computers
based on the Motorola 68000
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68000>architecture). The
project's slogan was "To boldly go where no Mac has gone
before."
The developers eventually reached a point where they could boot an
Intel 486<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80486>PC (with very specific
hardware) into System
7 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7_%28Macintosh%29>, and on-screen it
was indistinguishable from a Mac. However, *every* program needed to be
ported to the new x86 architecture in order to run. Supposedly programs
could be ported with little effort because Apple developed equivalent
headers for x86.
The project was a joint development with
Novell<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novell>(although Apple provided
the majority of engineers). Novell at the time was
one the leaders of cross-platform file-servers, and the plan was that Novell
would market the resulting OS as a challenge to Microsoft Windows. However,
the project was cancelled in mid-1993 because of political infighting,
personnel issues, and the questionable marketability of such a project. Fear
that the new operating system would hurt Apple's hardware sales presumably
played a role.
[edit<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Star_Trek_project&act…
] Legacies
Although a direct *x*86 port was never released to the public, one could run
the classic Mac OS on non-Mac computers through
emulation<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emulation>and the development
of these was spurred by the failure of the Star Trek
project.[*citation
needed*]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources>Two of
the more popular Macintosh emulators are
vMac <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMac> and Basilisk
II<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilisk_II>II>,
both written by third parties.
Ten years after Project Star Trek, it became possible to natively run
Darwin<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system%29>29>,
the Unix <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix>-based core of Mac OS
X<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X>_X>,
on the x86 platform, by virtue of its open
source<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source> Apple
Public Source License<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Public_Source_License>and
NeXT base. However, the OS X graphical
user interface <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_user_interface>,
named Aqua <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_%28GUI%29>, is proprietary and
is not included with the x86 port of Darwin.
Apple ran a similar project to Star Trek for Mac OS X. This project was
rumored to be code-named
Marklar<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marklar_project>(although often
referred to as "Star Trek, the NeXT Generation" on rumor
sites). Marklar's task was to keep Mac OS X and all supporting applications
(including iLife <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILife> and
Xcode<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcode>)
running on the x86 architecture as well as that of the PowerPC. Marklar was
revealed by Apple's CEO Steve Jobs in June 2005, when he announced the
Macintosh transition to Intel processors starting in 2006.
[edit<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Star_Trek_project&act…
] See also
- Apple Intel transition<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Intel_transition>
- OSx86 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSx86>
[edit<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Star_Trek_project&act…
] External links
- Quest for the Operating
System<http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/oshistory/6.html>Star Trek from
Kernelthread
- Star Trek: Apple's First Mac OS on Intel
Project<http://lowendmac.com/orchard/05/0613.html>from Low End Mac
Star Trek: Apple's First Mac OS on Intel Project Low End Mac Reader
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Tom Hormby <tomhormby at gmail.com> - 2005.06.13
The first Apple proposal to move the Macintosh to Intel hardware did not
begin with Mac OS X. It began in 1985, shortly after Steve Jobs' departure
from Apple. The project was quickly nixed by
Apple's management, but it
would be revived several years later in a joint
effort by Novell and Apple
to port the Mac OS to the x86 processor.
Microsoft released Windows 3.1 in 1992, and it quickly became the best
selling program in the industry. Both Novell and Apple were threatened by
the new operating system. Novell feared that the new version of Windows (and
especially the pending release of Windows NT) would interfere with its
NetWare product, which held a near monopoly in PC networks.
[image: Intel 486 SX]Apple was equally threatened. Windows was not as easy
to use, but Windows PCs cost less than Macs, and Windows could run standard
DOS apps without add-on cards or emulation.
Novell began work modernizing Digital Research's GEM, best known as the
graphical environment used on the Atari ST, and turning it into a competitor
to Windows. The legal department at Novell got the jitters over the project
and had it canceled, fearing that an enhanced GEM would attract a lawsuit
from Apple.
[image: Star Trek's Enterprise]Darrell Miller, then Vice President of
marketing at Novell, made a proposal to Apple CEO John Sculley about porting
the Mac OS to Intel hardware. Sculley was thrilled by the offer - he wanted
Apple to move away from the expensive hardware business and turn it into a
software provider.
[image: Intel's Andy Grove]The project to bring the Mac OS to the Intel 486
began on Valentine's Day in 1992 and was named "Star Trek". The project was
blessed by Intel's CEO Andy Grove, who feared Microsoft's power in the PC
market.
Apple's leadership gave a deadline of October 31 (Halloween) for creating a
working prototype of Star Trek. The group set to work porting the Mac OS to
Intel processors.
The task was a tedious one. Much of the software was written in assembly
code to make the computer faster and use less disk space. All of this code
had to be totally rewritten for the 486. Other parts of the operating system
were easier - most of the interface elements had been written in Pascal and
only required a few modifications.
There were several other technical hurdles to overcome in porting the Mac OS
to Intel processors. The software relied heavily on the ROMs in Macs, which
stored much of the operating system and dictated how many GUI features
behaved. It would be too expensive to create new ROMs for PC users, so the
group implemented the ROMs in software, loading them during startup. (This
feature would not be incorporated into Macs until 1998 with the introduction
of the iMac <http://lowendmac.com/imacs/imac.shtml>.)
The group missed their deadline by a month and had a functional demo ready
by December 1, 1992. Apple executives were amazed to see the Finder run on
an ordinary PC. The engineers did more than that - QuickDraw GX and
QuickTime were also ported to the x86.
With the first goal of the project completed, the engineers took a vacation
in Mexico, and the management at Apple and Novell began to decide how to
complete the project.
[image: It's True]Unfortunately, John Sculley's reign at Apple came to an
end in the middle of the Star Trek project. The new CEO, Michael Spindler,
had little interest in porting the Mac OS to the x86 and devoted most of
Apple's resources to preparing System 7 for the PowerPC.
The Star Trek project was canceled, and the Mac OS would not run natively on
Intel until after Apple acquired NeXT in 1996, which already had an x86-base
operating system, NeXTstep.
In June 2005, Steve Jobs announced that Apple had been concurrently
developing OS X on Intel and PowerPC processors for five years - and that
future Macs would be based on Intel processors and future versions of Mac
OS X would run on Apple's forthcoming Intel-based hardware. [image: L E M]
3:01 p.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
My apologies to the list for that one (posting of a wikipedia article).
Hexxie snuck by me under a pseudonym.
Geeze do I really have to start going through the headers of all emails too?
Jay
3:29 p.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
My apologies to the list for that one (posting of a
wikipedia article).
Hexxie snuck by me under a pseudonym.
Geeze do I really have to start going through the headers of all emails
too?
I, for one, don't care if it came from Hex (or anyone else) via a pseudonym.
If it was appropriate enough to get approved by the moderators, it's good
enough for me.
Vince
4:14 p.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
I had written....
> Hexxie snuck by me under a pseudonym.
To which Vince replied....
I, for one, don't care if it came from Hex (or
anyone else) via a
pseudonym.
If it was appropriate enough to get approved by the moderators, it's good
enough for me.
I am the moderator in question. I DO care if it came from Hexstar, as I
banned him from the list and he then signed up under a pseudonym to get
around that and I didn't notice it. That is problem #1.
Problem #2 is that even if it came from a regular listmember, it still was
NOT appropriate enough to get approved by the moderators. Either I
accidentally approved it because I didn't read the entire post, or it got in
after I turned off full moderation mode. I am not sure which. Let me be
clear Vince, posting an entire wikipedia article to the list is not
appropriate.
If anyone wishes to continue this thread, please contact me offlist. I will
not have another long off-topic thread on this kind of thing. If the
sillyness escalates, people will find that I will be MUCH quicker to turn
emergency moderation mode back on than I was in the past.
Jay
11 Apr
11 Apr
3:53 a.m.
New subject: CEOWrite.... anyone?
Hi,
I've restored a great deal of Data General Eclipse MV8000 AOS backup
images. I am trying to read the data contained in CEO which was an
office Suite that Data Generals had.
I am looking for a copy of a DOS app called CEOWrite that will read in
CEO format files, if anyone has a copy, please contact me off-list, thanks.
Curt
7 Apr
7 Apr
3:52 a.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
Jim Leonard wrote:
Zane H. Healy wrote:
It sure was. I saw Mac OS X running on a 233MHz Pentium II at one of
our Seattle dev houses. This was back in 1999.
Obtaining it was a matter of:
1. Asking about it
2. Getting a denial that it existed
3. A week later, an anonymous package in brown paper showed up with some
unmarked CDs with no return address.
I swear I am not making any of that up.
You should have read the rest of what I wrote in that message. Namely the
following.
Did a copy
of this x86 Mac OS ever leak out onto the net?
Curt
To the best of my knowledge no. As far as I know this was never seeded to
developers. > OTOH, Rhapsody with the classic Mac OS interface
was seeded. I forget
> if it was DR2 or DR3 that first sported the Aqua interface, and the first
> Developer release or two only ran on x86 boxes. The "Prelude to
> Rhapsody" release first given out an the WWDC and then sent to
> developers was stock OPENSTEP 4.2 and while intended to run on
> x86 could apparently also be loaded on NeXT 68k systems as well
> as the correct HP PA-RISC or Sun Sparc systems.
The OS in question is "Star Trek" not "Rhapsody". "Star
Trek" was done
in house, and was roughly "System 7" era. I don't remember when exactly it
came out. I realize I'm on a sleep deficit here, but I'm getting tired of
people telling me I'm wrong, and that Mac OS X was released for the x86.
Read the whole message people! What I said was never released was "Mac OS"
not "Mac OS X"!
BTW, anyone that was a Registered Developer at the time had copies of all of
this.
This is also why I'd been saying for years that Mac OS X would eventually be
on Intel CPU's.
Zane (who is very grumpy and tired)
10:28 a.m.
New subject: Apple - Star Trek OS
Zane H. Healy wrote:
Rhapsody with the classic Mac OS interface was seeded.
I forget if it was DR2
or DR3 that first sported the Aqua interface, and the first Developer release
or two only ran on x86 boxes.
DR3 sported Aqua and dropped x86 support. Aqua never ran on x86 (well, until
recently, anyway).
,xtG
.tsooJ
--
Capitalisation is the difference between "I had to help my uncle
Jack off a horse," and "I had to help my uncle jack off a horse."
--
Joost van de Griek
<http://www.jvdg.net/>
5 Apr
5 Apr
7:33 a.m.
On Thu, 5 Apr 2007, David Betz wrote:
The biggest problem is that it only exists as a paper
listing at the
moment. I'm planning on typing it in once I get my SBC6120 working
(still have some parts on order). In any case, it was written using
PAL8 so it isn't a library that can be linked with other modules. I
guess that could be changed too. Are there PDP-8 cross development
tools available for modern machines?
I was hoping for a pdp8 C cross-compiler. Your hack seems to get the
closest.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
4:58 a.m.
On 4/4/07, David Griffith <dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu> wrote:
This sounds like it could be adapted for my purposes.
Some things I'd
want to address:
1) Can you specify which pages to swap? For the Z-machine, one would
want to swap the game data first, then the interpreter (if at all).
This is more targeted towards the VM model for a native Zmachine, but
the philosophy holds, I think... The model that Infocom used was to
not swap the interpreter ever. The interpreters written in assembler
for the 6502 were a few K-bytes. The one that Mike Riley wrote for
the 1802 is also a few K-bytes. By "few", I mean more than 5, less
than 10. The pure (unchanging) game file pages could be overwritten
at any time because it was easier to re-fetch them from known places
on the disk than to track where they might end up if written
dynamically. The "impure" game file storage (variables, stack...)
were read in from the floppy *once* per session, then written out as
the saved game. They were never swapped out during game play (the
performance hit would be *terrible*), though there's nothing in the
architecture that forbids it. The model was to never write to the
game floppy, only to read from it. Games were saved by request, all
at once, by recording all of the changed game pages to a floppy (a
C-64 floppy could hold, IIRC, 4 v3-game saves per 170K, but there's no
guarantee they were using the disk efficiently).
I would think that emulating a processor that's running an interpreter
would make it exceedingly difficult to differentiate memory types used
but the application. This would turn the -8 emulator code into,
essentially, a huge exercise in disk swapping with the side effect of
interpreting PDP-11 code, I'd think.
2) Perhaps this emulator could be stripped down to to
run one particular
program: Frotz compiled for pdp11.
3) Can the emulator be wrapped up with the only binary it will run? The
idea is to have a single Frotz binary for pdp8 to simplify distribution.
I would think that if you were going to try to emulate an -11 on an
-8, you'd want the simplest possible -11 program running under that
environment - Frotz isn't that simple. Megan Gentry has a nicely
working Zmachine written in MACRO-11 for RT-11.
Frotz, owing to its origins in C, is going to have huge amounts of
library overhead.
-ethan
7:49 a.m.
On Wed, 4 Apr 2007, Ethan Dicks wrote:
I would think that if you were going to try to emulate
an -11 on an
-8, you'd want the simplest possible -11 program running under that
environment - Frotz isn't that simple. Megan Gentry has a nicely
working Zmachine written in MACRO-11 for RT-11.
Interesting. I wonder if there's anything in there that's helpful in
making a pdp8 zmachine. I went ahead and uploaded it to the IF Archive.
Frotz, owing to its origins in C, is going to have
huge amounts of
library overhead.
I'm aware of that problem. However, the core and dumb interface use only
libc, so that may be helpful.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
6483
days inactive
6490
days old
44 comments
21 participants
participants (21)
-
bear＠typewritten.org -
bfranchuk＠jetnet.ab.ca -
cclist＠sydex.com -
cisin＠xenosoft.com -
curt＠atarimuseum.com -
dbetz＠xlisper.com -
dgriffi＠cs.csubak.edu -
emu＠e-bbes.com -
ethan.dicks＠gmail.com -
healyzh＠aracnet.com -
irisworld＠mac.com -
jbmcb1＠gmail.com -
jvdg＠sparcpark.net -
jwest＠classiccmp.org -
nolandoakley＠gmail.com -
pechter＠gmail.com -
ploopster＠gmail.com -
segin2005＠gmail.com -
spectre＠floodgap.com -
trixter＠oldskool.org -
vrs＠msn.com