<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.
<quite the same thing. Anyway, it's called Lunix. I haven't tried it yet,
There is also ELKS embedded kernal linux aimed at XT class(16bit) and
other small machines.
<but it's possible that Lunix could become fairly popular amongst the
<8-bitters. The point I was trying to make about running Minix (since you
Linux is is one form of popular free unix and was launched on PC hardware
that happens to be 32bit(386 and later).
Fitting unix on most 8bitter means a minikernal and swapping as most
8bitters have only a 64k address space unless some banking logic was
added or the CPU is only of the later z80 varients with MMU(z180 1mb, z280
16mb).
<generally run that on a PC anyway) is that it just simply makes more
<sense to run Linux or FreeBSD or some other supported operating system.
Minix is supported exactly the same way LINUX is.
<It's possible to run those operating systems with 8MB comfortably
<(provided you're not running XFree86)...all the text-based stuff runs
<just fine. Besides 8MB RAM doesn't exactly break the bank nowadays. :)
Well, my 386 is running it in 8mb with xfree86 and while not blindingly
fast it does run well. Not everyone has bundles of cash for their
computer.
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.
Allison
Received on Sun May 03 1998 - 13:12:59 BST