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From: gus@Shasta.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: UNIX for the Mac? (Don't laugh...)
Message-ID: <1566@Shasta.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 3-Dec-85 13:35:58 EST
Article-I.D.: Shasta.1566
Posted: Tue Dec  3 13:35:58 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 6-Dec-85 08:02:41 EST
References: <686@k.cs.cmu.edu>
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 23

> Does anyone know any strong reason that a 2 Megabyte Mac with a couple of
> twenty meg hard disks could not be a perfectly good UNIX workstation?  I
> can't think of any major obstacles to, say, a 4.2bsd port, other than the
> lack of memory management.  Given the apparent ease of doing HyperDrive-like
> hardware hacks, I don't see why a memory management unit could not be added
> with relative ease and low cost.

I guess that if you take a mouse (rodent type) and put on an elephant's
trunk, and an elephant's ears, and an elephant's tail, and an elephant's
body, and an elephant's size, you would finally end up with a squeaking 
pachyderm!

Yes, folks, eventually, you MIGHT be able to port UNIX to the Mac, but it
would take so many hardware kluges which ar NOT supported by Apple that it
would hardly be a viable product. As a rule, third party developers do not
rely on each others' hardware. Perhaps the only exception I know about is
the Z80 softcard for the Apple II from Microsoft. (Besides the generic CP/M
software, a handfull of programs were written especially for this 
configuration.) The changes you suggest all
require additions to an (undocumented) motherboard which Apple may feel
perfectly free to change in the future.

Just because the Mac has a 68K doesn't mean that it can (or should) run UNIX.