Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!ANDREW.CMU.EDU!jm7e+
From: jm7e+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU ("Jeremy G. Mereness")
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: Unix OS for //s?
Message-ID: <MW77d0y00WE2z4w085@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: 19 Feb 88 17:54:08 GMT
References: <7279@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 35


Doug Qwyn writes...

> 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.

This may not seem like much, but Kyan's Kix shell that came with Kyan pascal
could be used to do just this. All input is assumed to be a prodos 
execute-file
command. "prefix" for example, would be a command file called prefix that 
changes
the directory. "Prefix" can be renamed to, say, "cd" like in UNIX. 

What's nice about Kyan is that the shell itself is extremely small.

The trouble is, I have not heard anything about the promised 16-bit version of 
Kix for 
a long, long time. Too bad... it promised things like batch file support, 
multiple command
input, etc. 

Anyone know what happenned to Kyan?


Sincerely,


Capt. Albatross