Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ogicse!caesar.cs.montana.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!uflorida!mephisto!prism!ccastjr
From: ccastjr@prism.gatech.EDU (COOOOoooooOOOoooOOOKIE!!!!)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Multi-tasking on the IIe
Message-ID: <6992@hydra.gatech.EDU>
Date: 13 Mar 90 18:00:25 GMT
Reply-To: ccastjr@prism.gatech.EDU (COOOOoooooOOOoooOOOKIE!!!!)
Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology
Lines: 49


     On the idea of multi-tasking stuff for unix and such..  I just realised
that I have a Apple II+ and an Apple IIe..  I was thinking that perhaps one of
these could be used as a supervisor, and the other as a worker (bare with me 
here for a sec)..

instead of the processor interupting itself, exiting the current "user" level
process, and entering the supervisor mode, then making a context switch etc etc
(the way a 68000 based system does it), why not cannibalise the two Apple II's
so that one machine "controls" the other processor (lets it run for X amount of
time, then halts it, changes all of it's 'process' information, and restarts
the processor).

I know that  the 68000 has a halt pin..but I don't know how the 6502 handles this..
and I also wonder if it might just be better to snag a 8502.  It would take some
doing, but I think I could preserve some of the Apple II disk handling and such so
that the new machine would still be able to run Apple II applications without having
too much problem.

Someone is bound to say "why not just buy a sun 3/60, they're going for $1500 dollars
right now"..but that's not the point..yes, I know this would probaby take more effort
than it's worth... 

but the point of this discussion isn't the easiest way to handle "getting a unix like
box", it's "how can I do it with a Apple II+ and an Apple IIe".

oh..the stuff that I really want out of a "unix-like environment" is about 3 things:

1: I/O redirection
2: multi-tasking and piping
3: the dicotomy of OS and programming environment (ie. the AppleDos prompt is the 
   prompt for both the OS and the Applesoft-BASIC programming environment)

I guess scripts might be nice too..  and unix commands would be good (but I can do
that by using a beagle brothers utility to rename the dos commands)..

it's just annoying to me that I can't write a program that reads the output of another
program as it's input...or that text files aren't handled the same as a BASIC program
file..

John



-- 
                         ccastjr@prism.gatech.edu
                        John Rudd (ex- kzin@ucscb)
      The opinions expressed here-in are mine, and not those of my boss 
(he has no opinions).  Send all comments, flames, and complaints to /dev/null.