Unix-PC

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 03/24/2018 07:58 PM, Warner Losh wrote:


On Sat, Mar 24, 2018 at 5:44 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org<mailto:cctalk at classiccmp.org>> wrote:


The Unix-PC has found a new home in the hands of someone
I am sure will enjoy and appreciate it.  I would expect him to
show up here sometime with questions as he tries to revive
it.  I tried booting it and while it booted fine from the diagnostic
floppy and things like memory and CPU tested OK it won't boot
off the hard disk which means either the hard disk has died
(a possibility considering its age) or could just be bit rot.  In
any event, he got all the floppies that went with it.  Who knows,
might show up at VCF-East some day.

At least it has MFM hard drives, which means that it can use the MFM emulator to have near infinite storage (sadly, only ~64MB at a time due to limitations in the controller, it seems).

I wondered about that.  I heard someone was working on one but I never saw it.
Got any pointers?  70M is the limit I think.  has something to do with the registers
in the controller.  But I seem to remember a mod to let it use two disks. That would
make it 140M.


It would be cool if it could run something more modern, but don't those boxes max at at 4MB or 8MB of RAM?


This one has 1 Meg.  Amount isn't the problem, finding the expansion boards is.  They
were rare in its heyday and probably unobtanium today.

As for something more modern, I always thought it would be an improvement if it ran
BSD.  Even with only one meg it should be able to run 2.11BSD if someone could do a
port.  Then you put NFS on and disk space is no longer a problem.  :-)

bill