Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!amdcad!ames!nrl-cmf!cmcl2!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple Subject: Re: Unix OS for //s? Message-ID: <7279@brl-smoke.ARPA> Date: 18 Feb 88 22:38:01 GMT References: Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) ) Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD. Lines: 18 In article mm65+@andrew.cmu.edu (Michael Scott McMahon) writes: > Does anyone know of, or is anyone working on, a Unix OS for the //? I don't think anyone is working on quite that. I've given considerable thought to what is possible versus what would be desired, and have concluded that it would be better to provide a UNIX-like command, programming, and execution environment rather than a UNIX clone. This is primarily because of the need to support the built-in loading, memory allocation, etc. in the IIGS ROM, which assumes ProDOS is available. Because ProDOS supports a hierarchical directory system similar to UNIX's, I think it could be used for file management in a UNIXy environment. The main lossage is that there doesn't seem to be any really good way to support preemptive multitasking, although with some explicit scheduling hooks it could be emulated to some degree. Personally I would be satisfied with an APW shell that more resembled the UNIX environment instead of VMS or whatever their model was.