WANCHO@SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL ("Frank J. Wancho") (09/25/88)
For the record, Ed Ziemba did the principal work in developing MARC, a Unix-like OS for the Z80, collaborating with Lauren Weinstein and Leor Zolman (of BDS-C fame), among others. After Ed died in an unfortunate and untimely snorkling accident, Lauren picked up the work. Toward the end of 1982, Lauren's hard disk failed, and he had to resort to using floppy disks to regenerate the system - a slow and painful process. MARC required a working CP/M BIOS to use as the device interface and provided a combination of a V6/V7 interface, an extensively reworked runtime BDS-C library, a version of MINCE, the EMACS-like editor from Mark of the Unicorn, and the ability to run well-behaved CP/M programs. Attached to the end of this message are two messages from Lauren submitted in November 1983 announcing the demise of MARC and the reasons why. --Frank -------------------- Date: Tue, 1 Nov 83 1:11:29 EST From: R. Bruce Natalie (CTAB) <rbn@brl-vgr> To: info-micro@brl-vgr, info-cpm@brl-vgr Subject: [lauren: status report message] Lauren Weinstein has sent me the following message regarding the MARC software package. For those of you who don't know, MARC is an attempt to get as much of UNIX as you can on a 8080 based system. This message was forwarded to me as list maintainer because he was uncertain whether it would be viewed as a commercial statement and thus be a prohibitted use of the DDN. I find this note to be of the informational type, which is one of the primary purposes of this list and therefore am forwarding it on his behalf. Mr Weinstein's mailing address is: <vortex!lauren@rand-unix> Ron Natalie INFO-MICRO-REQUEST@BRL-VGR INFO-CPM-REQUEST@BRL-VGR --------- A very brief status report on MARC: Due to various technical problems, the rapidly advancing state of the art in software and affordable hardware, and a variety of marketing considerations, the MARC software project has been terminated. No further work is taking place on the software, and the MARC software package will henceforth not be sold or distributed in any manner. Persons with specific questions on this topic may feel free to contact me, but the decision is irrevocable. Thanks much. --Lauren-- Date: Thursday, 10 Nov 1983 16:56-PST Realname: Lauren Weinstein To: INFO-CPM@brl Subject: Erroneous information from hp-pcd!craig about MARC From: lauren@rand-unix I sincerely hope that this will be my last message on this topic. I don't know what hp-pcd!craig has been smoking, but his information regarding MARC is absolutely and totally wrong and confused. There isn't any "George" at Vortex. I AM VORTEX. VORTEX IS ME. Period. I will NOT be selling or distributing MARC in any manner. The MARC software project has been terminated. MARC was designed only for the 8080/Z80 processors and there have never been any plans to distribute a MARC for the 68000 or any other processors. In point of fact, the overwhelming percentage of software in the MARC software package is written in a non-standard 8080 assembler and is most decidedly NOT portable in any manner. To be blunt, the system was not really usable as other than a toy. Performance with floppies was miserable and could not be reasonably improved. Even with hard disks, many operations were extremely slow. The system could NOT make use of additional memory over 64K in any manner, and the useful workspace for user programs ended up being only around 30K, sometimes even less. CP/M compatibility did not function properly for about 75% of currently tested CP/M programs. The MARC software package is fundamentally limited by its original design parameters, and has no future beyond hardware which is rapidly heading into oblivion -- and, as I stated, it doesn't work well enough even on that hardware. There are a variety of software products from various vendors on the market which can provide much of the MARC functionality in a much more reasonable manner, and which won't ignore the entire base of existing CP/M software in the process. Microshell and Software Tools are two obvious examples of reasonable approaches to the problem of providing such an environment on limited machines. There are also packages which can make effective use of bank-switched memory and provide for much faster disk access, which should help to provide functionality for that hardware which MARC could not and cannot provide. MARC was a good effort but is just too fundamentally limited by the underlying hardware base for which it was designed and written. It is just "too much" for such hardware -- the operating system takes up so much of the memory and disks that there just isn't anything reasonable left for the humans! Also very important is the fact that MARC's being written mostly in 8080 assembler made it difficult to maintain and modify and essentially impossible to take forward into the future in the rapidly changing micro marketplace. You might be interested to know that of the people I've talked to about the termination of the project, the vast majority admitted that they were planning to try upgrade to newer hardware (usually with lots more memory and usually running a fullblown multiprocess Unix or real multiprocess Unix look-alike system) in the near future. Most of the people (few as they were) who sounded the most disappointed were those with hardware that would not reasonably run MARC in any case. However, the bottom line is that bugs and poor performance would require so much more code to fix properly that the remaining memory space would be made even smaller and less useful! I don't sell *or* distribute software with which I am not happy. I never sold a single copy of the MARC software package because I refused to send out buggy and limited software. It doesn't matter whether the package was going to cost $0 or $500, I simply refuse to distribute software with which I am dissatisfied. I've spent a large amount of time on the project, and I'm not happy about the final outcome -- but it's time to face reality on this topic. It was fun trying, anyway, but I've made my decision and it is final -- I need to get on with my life and try to make a living! I really have nothing more to say about this. That's all, folks. --Lauren-- ====================