Small UNIX boxes (was RE: Netscape (was Re: PayPal = payola?))

From: Julius Sridhar <vance_at_ikickass.org>
Date: Thu Jan 31 07:47:53 2002

On Thu, 31 Jan 2002, Ethan Dicks wrote:

> > > > My smallest UNIX box right now is my TI-92 calculator.
> > >
> > > Explain explain explain!
> >
> > Well, it's a tiny little calculator based on a 10 MHz 68000 and 188KB of
> > RAM, and 320 KB Flash ROM. It has a QWERTY keyboard and a 240X180 (?)
> > screen. Check out http://www.ticalc.org/ and look under TI-92+.
>
> Looks way cool. The 68000 is one of my favorite chips, too. The
> bad news is the price... I just looked up several auctions on ePay
> and find that they auction for more than my iOpener or my Audrey. :-(

I was a math major, so my parents popped the $200 at the time to buy it.
Regular retail now is around $160. It has *powerful* calculator
functions.

> Still... if I ever run across one for under $100 (hah!), I'll probably
> pick it up and throw UNIX on it.
>
> With that tiny screen, can you still play rogue on it? NetHack? I'd
> throw a Z-machine interpreter on it if there were enough room... Zork
> anyone? (I suppose one could port a Z-machine interpreter to assembler;
> the data files start around 90KB for the oldest Infocom games - that
> begs the question, though: does it have a RAM disk with a filesystem?)

Good question. I've never looked how storage is allocated. I'll look it
up and let you know.

Peace... Sridhar
Received on Thu Jan 31 2002 - 07:47:53 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:34:59 BST