i860: Re: modern stuff

[Eric Smith]

On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 12:13 PM alan--- via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:

> I know i960 is a very different beast, but was there ever any high level
> OSs that ran on it?


It was originally the BiiN processor, and ran the Osiris operating system.
However, few if any were sold, and it disappeared without a trace, leading
to BiiN being retronym'd "Billions invested in Nothing".

The i960 was how Intel repositioned it to try to salvage as much as
possible. Most i960 variants either don't have the tag bit hardware and
object-oriented "microcode" that was used for BiiN; it is only officially
present in the i960MX, but might also be in the i960MC. I think only the MX
and MC have an MMU.

It should be possible to port {Unix,xBSD,Linux} to the i960MC, but I don't
think anyone has.