Uncle Roger wrote:
>
> At 02:12 PM 5/3/98 -0400, you wrote:
> ><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.
>
> I have heard tell (from a very reliable source) of a version of Unix
> written for the Radio Shack Model 100 (8085, 32K max). (And no, it's not
> available, and yes, he's tried to get the company that did it to release it.)
Somebody may have ported something similar to OS-9 the Mod 100, but
no way this side of Hell would it run anything like a real Unix --
even Radio Shack's first Xenix had a 70k kernel. A set of Unix-like
commands, that's not impossible though hard to implement in a machine
with interpretive BASIC as its core OS. Look at the MKS toolkit of
Unix utilities for MS-DOS -- they ran just fine on a 256k Tandy 2000.
which demonstrates that they used standard system calls and vectors
instead of the calls to specific IBM hardware locations that seemed
necessary to most MS-DOS programmers.
> I thought someone had said that CP/M was based on Unix? Or was that one
> of the PDP opsys?
Gary based the command set and most utilities he did on RT-11 -- and
some parts of Unix share that ancestry. MS-DOS, originally cloned
from CP/M, gained a lot of imports from Unix with v2.0 because of the
Xenix project.
> >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.
These things are only a "must" to run the bloated applications that
keep showing up simply because the new machines can run them.
--
Ward Griffiths
They say that politics makes strange bedfellows.
Of course, the main reason they cuddle up is to screw somebody else.
Michael Flynn, _Rogue Star_
Received on Fri May 08 1998 - 00:05:02 BST