Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watnot!watmath!clyde!rutgers!lll-lcc!mordor!sri-spam!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!jade!eris!mwm From: mwm@eris.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: UNIX from HELL Message-ID: <2981@jade.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: Tue, 31-Mar-87 11:27:07 EST Article-I.D.: jade.2981 Posted: Tue Mar 31 11:27:07 1987 Date-Received: Sat, 4-Apr-87 06:22:04 EST References: <1439@cadovax.UUCP> <3786@utai.UUCP> Sender: usenet@jade.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: mwm@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike (My watch has windows) Meyer) Distribution: world Organization: Missionaria Phonibalonica Lines: 59 Keywords: You don't need a giant machine In article <3786@utai.UUCP> gbs@gpu.utcs.UUCP (Gideon B. Sheps) writes: >Hmm, so you need 1Meg ram and >15M hard disk to run UNIX ... >Quoting from my trusty "the UNIX prog. env." by K+Pike I see that Yeah, and it's gonna run real lousy, and you won't have much space for your own files. > "The UNIX operating system started on a cast-off DEC PDP-7 ..." Hand-written in assembler, without multitasking, and missing lots of other features. >with, I believe, a memory that an most computers today could misplace and >never notice the loss of. Granted UNIX has grown slightly [:-)] since >but, as Andrew Tannenbaum has recently shown us (MINIX), the essentials >can still fit into a desk-sized box at studently attainable prices. All true. But MINIX is a subset of V7, not 4BSD or SysV. And anyone who's seen OS/9 running on a 64K CoCo knows that you can put the essentials of Unix in a desktop box. >I hope that my Amiga is an improvement over a PDP-7; An Amiga is an improvement over a good-sized chunk of the PDP-11 line, much less a PDP-7. >so it seems to follow that some kind of UNIX could be implemented for it. Yeah, "some kind." Let me introduce you to Keith Bostic, who's spent the last few months going slowly crazy trying to squeeze 4.3BSD functionality into a micro PDP-11. This box is faster than an amiga, has about the same amount of memory, but suffers from the 11 16-bit address registers. V7 unix fits quite nicely on an 11. If you build a large system, you need to do things like overlaid kernels and shoving buffers into supervisor space to make it work. But a small system will run on an 11/23 without much trouble. But a SysV or 4BSD system? With 300K kernels on small systems? You wanna run _that_ on your Amiga? You wanna do fork() without an MMU? You crazy, mon. Maybe OS/9, which has fork/exec. Mabye a Minix port, if you can figure out how to do fork/exec. This has all been gone over in info-68k. Dig out the archives and see for yourself (actually, this is still going on there).