Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!sun!imagen!atari!portal!portal!cup.portal.com!ts
From: ts@cup.portal.com (Tim W Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: Why no VM on a 68K? (was: Re: Why 68000?)
Message-ID: <27248@cup.portal.com>
Date: 23 Feb 90 11:09:15 GMT
References: <1990Feb11.154304.19943@smsc.sony.com> <3919@hub.UUCP>
  <10223@hoptoad.uucp> <1990Feb15.155556.5319@uncecs.edu>
  <19472@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <22145@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
  <1990Feb16.164414.6377@intercon.com>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 29

> Trivia quiz: anyone remember the 68012?

Yes.  Anyone remember Callan Data Systems?  I worked there and ported
a UniSoft System V for the 68000 port to the 68012 and added demand
paged virtual memory.

That was a lot of fun.  Callan was a small company that was in the midst
of going under, but was going ahead with building the new machine.
I managed to convince my boss that we should do our own VM system
rather than wait for UniSoft to do one.

I'm not sure I really convinced him we could do it, but he could see
that the company was going under and so was getting ready to leave
so he said "go ahead".

By the time he left and a replacement was hired, I had started
implementing the system.  I was able to convince the new boss
that I knew what I was doing, so I was allowed to continue.  Another
programmer was assigned to the project to help code.

Guess what?  About five months after I said "Let's do our own VM",
we had a stable system that worked quite well.  We even used
copy-on-write fork ( hah! take that, BSD! ).

And then the company went under.  This was annoying, because they
were next going to let me design a windowing system for Unix.
That was going to be a lot of fun.

					Tim Smith