COBB%BRANDEIS.BITNET@mitvma.mit.edu (Wes Cobb) (04/14/89)
... Patrick B. Haggood ( APEARSON%WAYNEST1.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU ) writes.. > > I remember a multi-user OS was ported to the Radio Shack Color Computer, > uh, OS-9 it was. I've never seen it, but have heard it was unix-like > and could multi-task. This on a machine that can only have 64k or so > memory, and it *is* 8-bit.... > there still is. OS-9 is a very compact (its written in 6809 or 680xx assembler) REALTIME dialect of unix. c, basic, pascal are available and the usual slew of pd unix stuff can be brought up on the machine. the 6809 is a special beast among `8' bit mpus though -- its got a powerful enough instruction set that you can write decent position independent code on it. ( the quotes on 8 are because the registers are 16 bits wide ). there is even hardware mmu available for it so you can get up to a meg or so of ram on a 6809 based machine. oh yeah -- images on 8 bit machines are usually 2x or more SMALLER than on 16 bit machines. so space isnt as big a problem as you might expect. for the record -- a 2 MHz 6809 is about as fast as an 8 MHz 68000 as long as you are only interested in character and short integer stuff -- and thus significantly faster than a stock pc. i daresay minix COULD be ported to the 6809 if andy were so inclined. wes cobb physics dept brandeis university waltham, mass