Ancient machines turning on (was Re: eBay strikes again...)

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Mon Nov 2 14:28:29 1998

At 11:36 AM 11/2/98 -0800, D. Peschel wrote:
>
>I knew there was a reliance on shared memory, but I didn't know it was that
>deep. Are you talking just about the custom hardware? [...]
>Or does the OS rely on shared memory as well? (by being nosy about its own
>routines, perhaps)

Yes, certainly the custom chips (for blitting and sound) relied on
the shared "chip" memory area, but the most elemental part of the
OS, message passing and "ports", relied on deeply-ingrained notions
of all those bits of memory being visible to all processes. That's
not to say that it would be impossible to bolt VM and an MMU on
that, but it's tough to do retroactively.

- John
Received on Mon Nov 02 1998 - 14:28:29 GMT