Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!decvax!mandrill!neoucom!wtm
From: wtm@neoucom.UUCP (Bill Mayhew)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga UNIX
Message-ID: <1133@neoucom.UUCP>
Date: 24 Apr 88 03:38:27 GMT
References: <211@laic.UUCP> <3663@cbmvax.UUCP> <9031@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Sender: wfd@neoucom.UUCP
Organization: Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine
Lines: 30
Summary: Anybody remember PC/IX that ran on the lowly IBM XT?


I suppose if you really wanted it, you could run some flavor of
Unix on the Amiga.  Four years ago, I did some work using IBM's
PC/IX unixish operating system on an XT.  Because the XT was such
an unbelievably slow mahcine, it definitely wasn't much fun to work
with.  Santa Cruz Opeation aslo had Xenix for the XT -- without
MMU or even math coprocessor.  SCO's port even included troff.
True -- there were were quite a few bugs, and cc was definitely
brain-dead on memory models, but there was nothing fundamentally
unworkable.

Since the 680x0 has more addressing flexiblity, I don't see any
reason why some form of Unix could not run on the Amiga.  It would
be helpful to use the 68010.  The problem is that it definitely
would take some effort, so there would have to be a good number of
potential customers willing to buy it before I or anybody else
would consider going to the effort.  I suppose without an MMU it
would be difficult to meet full commercial reliability criteria.

One thing comes to mind.  I have a recreational AT&T Unix PC at
home to keep me busy when I get O.D.'ed on the Amiga.  The Unix PC
uses a 68010 and apparently very simple MMU that deals with fixed
size pages.  The Unix PC keeps the lower 512K for the kernel and
the video display  and walls users out of that space  ... I think
I've seen a similar achitecture somewhere; where could that be..?
Perhaps a little daugherboard could be kludged up with an MMU that
manages the fast RAM in 1K hunks and a 68010 could be stuffed into
the Ami's regular 68000 socket.


--Bill