Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!maverick.ksu.ksu.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!ucsd!nosc!crash!pnet01!jca
From: jca@pnet01.cts.com (John C. Archambeau)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Unix for Atari 8-bit
Message-ID: <2804@crash.cts.com>
Date: 25 May 90 03:16:04 GMT
Sender: root@crash.cts.com
Organization: People-Net [pnet01], El Cajon CA
Lines: 32

slayden@prandtl.nas.nasa.gov (James B. Slayden) writes:
>	Are there any commercial or developement projects to port any
>kind of unix to an Atari 8-bit machine? That is all I have right now and
>would like to use something like Minix to study with.

Probably after a full fledged K&R C compiler can be ported to the Atari
8-bit.  I can safely say since the Atari 8-bit machine was the first machine I
ever owned that I don't see a port of Minix ever happening.  We have enough
problems with the 64K segmentation of the 80x86 (x < 3) processors without
indroducing the problem of a 64K address space.  And even if you did kludge
the memory with the various memory upgrades out there, you'd still have the
problem of only having a single channel IRQ on the entire machine.  Not a
pretty thing to port any implementation of Unix to.

That's the whole reason I trashed my Atari 8-bit system eons ago and got an
IBM XT clone.  If you want bottom line Unix, you're going to have to get an XT
clone and run Minix on it, that is your only option.

If you want something a bit more powerful, then get an ST and run ST Minix on
it.  Minix does have its function inspite of the fact that PC Minix as it
stands now is a far cry from what I want in a Unix system.
 
     // JCA

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