kissell@flairvax.UUCP (Kevin Kissell) (11/16/83)
Having read about the demise of MARC, and having read the expressions of grief going around at its passing, I feel it behooves me to point out that there *is* a UN*X lookalike for the Z80, "Micronix", available from Morrow Designs of San Leandro, CA. It is purported to be an adaptation of Version 6 made possible by their somewhat clever S-100 CPU board architecture. It supports multiple megabytes of memory (mapped), although each process is restricted to 64k of usable memory (of course). I had heard of the system some time ago, as I have freinds who work at Morrow, but had always figured it was hoax, or at best a pseudo-shell supporting redirection sitting on a BDOS with a heirarchical file system. I finally got a chance to play with it and as a long time UN*X user, I must say I was very impressed. I've never worked under V6, (only V7, Sys III, and BSD 4.*), so I cannot be sure of which quirks are V6 and which are Morrows, but it seemed to support everything I tried except for runnung multiple processes simultaneously writing to the terminal. Pipe-connected multiprocess chains worked like a champ, and all of the favorite utilities (make, grep, etc.) were in place. One interesting feature was that their shell appears to check if a command issued corresponds to an executable file with an unexpressed (on the command line) .com extension, if so, it invokes a CP/M simulator which runs the command as if it were on a 64k CP/M system and on program completion returns to the shell. The system software is sold seperately, but I doubt it would run on many other people's iron. I'm not saying you should all rush out there and buy the thing, what with the price of 16 bit machines marching inexorably downward, but the impossible *has* been done.