Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!mephisto!ncsuvx!news
From: rnf@shumv1.uucp (Rick Fincher)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: UNIX on the Apple II?
Message-ID: <1990Jan18.173604.5529@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu>
Date: 18 Jan 90 17:36:04 GMT
References: <113300242@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: rnf@shumv1.ncsu.edu (Rick Fincher)
Organization: NCSU Computing Center
Lines: 23

In article <113300242@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu> saa33413@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
>
>several C compilers.  Theoretically, you could therefore run UNIX on an Apple
>II.  However, theory and practice are sometimes two different things.  Has
>anybody ever tried to run UNIX on an Apple II?  Does anybody know what kind
>of hardware it would take?  (I've heard UNIX is a bit large.)  I could

Andrew Tannenbaum, a Computer Science professor in Holland, has written a
UNIX clone called MINIX.  He wrote it to teach operating systems concepts
and has a book out with the C source code.  MINIX runs on a 640K IBM-PC but
uses its own disk format on that machine.  I mailed Dr. Tannenbaum recently
and he gave me the address of a guy doing a Mac port.  It takes about a meg
and uses the Mac OS as a disk access system (and presumably the memory manager
toolset).  I'd like to get this version and port it to the GS.  It is 
definately possible.  The code to MINIX has only a little assembler to 
implement interrupt driven context switching, Making it easy to port.
Efficiency is another matter.  The use of the tools should help, and you
have to start somewhere.  Slow functions could be optimized in assembler.

It would be an interesting, and fun project I think.

Rick Fincher
rnf@shumv1.ncsu.edu