cc@ucla-cs.UUCP (07/07/85)
With the advent of relatively cheap read-only storage (i.e the CD ROM), wouldn't it now be practical to run UNIX on some of these cheap-but-powerful personal computers that are coming down the pike? Supposedly a CD can hold about 550 megabytes, so it would be easy to put the UNIX manual pages and system programs (kernel, ls, cat, yacc, etc.) onto a CD (an audio CD now sells for about $15-$20, so bug-fixes and upgrades shouldn't be expensive), then use a small hard-disk drive or even one of the new fast mini-floppies for the rest of the system that can't be put in ROM. Does anybody know if this is in the cards?
steve@kontron.UUCP (Steve McIntosh) (07/09/85)
> Supposedly a CD can hold about 550 megabytes, so it would be easy to > put the UNIX manual pages and system programs (kernel, ls, cat, yacc, etc.) > onto a CD (an audio CD now sells for about $15-$20, so bug-fixes and > upgrades shouldn't be expensive), then use a small hard-disk drive or > even one of the new fast mini-floppies for the rest of the system that > can't be put in ROM. The main problem with the CD/ROM is that the worst case access time is over 1 second. On second thought, perhaps its not such a problem people used to a heavily loaded vax might see a performance improvement. I am sure that someone, somewhere, is going to put some flavor of UNIX on the new 68000 machines. Most of the people that are considering it complain that the memory management on the ST/Amiga is too simple for the kind of UNIX system they want. A good alternative for the ST might be OS-9 (level 1) which as far as I can tell has all the things I like about UNIX, and the Amiga is supposed to come with a multi tasking OS (called Intuition) built in.