Odd ideas that I've had lately...

From: Jeffrey S. Worley <Technoid_at_30below.com>
Date: Fri Feb 7 02:47:00 2003

OS/9 is a proprietary os I was lead to believe. I don't think getting
the source would be an easy thing to do on-the-cheap, but you might look
into a freeware operating system that has been around on 68k for quite
some time called "MiNT" or "FreeMiNT" or "SpareMiNT". It is a BSD
variant that will run with or without and MMU and with or without a
mathco.

I run it on a 4mb Atari Mega4 ST. I don't have enough ram to run X and
actually DO anything, but it is fully multiuser, multithreaded,
multitasking etc. and works peachy for me if I avoid trying to use X.
There is a free version of Multitos which will run atop it too. With
all that and Slip/ppp networking running to my sparcstation, I have
about 1.5mb free for programs which on this machine is plenty.

MiNT scales nicely also. If you have a killer 030/040/060 system, it
will detect and utilize it's hardware appropriately (virtual memory,
math extensions etc). It has been ported from the ST to the Mac and I
think to the Amiga.

Since it is BSD, you can easily cross-compile apps from other platforms
which makes development a whole lot easier.

Oh, MiNT stands for "MiNT is Not Tos". Some say 'is Now' as it was
picked up by Atari as the basis for multitos in the early 90's?

Regards,

Jeff

-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-admin_at_classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-admin_at_classiccmp.org]
On Behalf Of Roger Merchberger
Sent: Friday, February 07, 2003 1:26 AM
To: cctalk_at_classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: Odd ideas that I've had lately...

At 21:04 02/06/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>I was sitting at home reading my latest copy of Mouser (component
catalog)

As I have done most recently... ;-)

> Palms and Visors...

I've had a somewhat different _psycho-wacky_ idea -- what would it take
to
get OS-9/68K ported to the Palm? I have a Palm 3c with a partially dead
battery, twiddling it's thumbs, which would make a decent "play-palm"...

uClinux looks too bulky & slow, compared to OS-9...

Anyone here work for Radisys/MicroWare... Any chance they'd sell
hobbyist
source licenses??? :-)

One bad thing with this is I did some googling earlier today (for sh*ts
&
grins) and there's not a ton of info about the internals of the Palms
(things like memory maps, display access parameters, etc...) out
there...

>...but the palm doesn't have built in USB or Ethernet or Serial,

Ahem, *all* the older Palms (up to & including the 3C) had built-in
Serial,
and the newer ones have built-in USB... mind you, you need a Handspring
with it's built-in CF slot to get ethernet...

> you are stuck with a bulky add-on or a cradle...

Or just a cable... been on the open market for years... :-)

>...possibly SCSI on a standard AT board in as small a size as possible
>while enabling use of as many slots in the back of an AT case for the
>AGPx, PCI and ISA. I was thinking of using something like an AMD-based
>Ethernet chip with the prototype board's VIA motherboard chipset.
Anyone
>have comments?

Why? Just to have a very small computer? If so, there's a new "standard"

out that about 1/2 the size of a Micro-ATX board... the whole computer's

about 9-10" high... Available in Athlon & Pentium4 flavors...

... If you were looking at the slower machines to save money, the custom

mobo's will cure that...

Just more assorted ramblings... ;-)

Roger "Merch" Merchberger
Received on Fri Feb 07 2003 - 02:47:00 GMT