Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncr-sd!hp-sdd!hplabs!ucbvax!pasteur!mars.Berkeley.EDU!dean
From: dean@mars.Berkeley.EDU (R. Drew Dean)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.nsc.32k
Subject: Re: AUTHOR SPEAKS: '532 Manifesto
Keywords: cheap nsc 532
Message-ID: <7694@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 23 Nov 88 00:31:48 GMT
References: <433@sdrc.UUCP> <2659@sultra.UUCP> <115@usl-pc.usl.edu>
Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU
Reply-To: dean@mars.Berkeley.EDU (R. Drew Dean)
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 27

In article <115@usl-pc.usl.edu> elg@killer.UUCP writes:
>On the other hand, someone else mentioned Minix. Minix includes all
>the utilities necessary to do minimal Unix, but its kernal is very
>eighty-eighty-sux specific and quite minimal (does no paging,
>implements subset of V7, etc.). It would need a LOT of work to run on
>a high-end 32K system.
>
>===
>Eric Lee Green                            P.O. Box 92191, Lafayette, LA 70509
>     {ames,mit-eddie,osu-cis,...}!killer!elg, killer!usl!elg, etc.

Uh...I guess you haven't been following the net too closely....
A few weeks ago Andrew Tannenbaum (sp?), the author of Minix, announced the
avaiability of Minix on the Atari-ST, (for those who don't know), a 68000
machine....As for virtual memory, I think that an MMU to provide hardware
memory protection is needed, but with 4Mb RAM on a _single_-user system,
I should hope that there wouldn't be TOO much paging going on, actually
there really shouldn't be much of ANY paging....(Of course some really
large jobs will page, and if you're running Lisp under X Windows (anyone
want to volunteer to do the port ? :-) (100 MB of source + docs for X11R3), 
and Macsyma at the same time, you're going to be close to thrashing ....)

Minix remains an alternative, but I'd rather see 4.3 BSD...(But look where
I'm coming from...:-))

Drew Dean
dean@xcssun.berkeley.edu