pete@titan.rice.edu (Pete Keleher) (11/18/89)
Andy Tannenbaum has announced that a port to the Mac of his Minix operating
system has now been completed. The problem now is convincing Prentice-Hall
to sell it. Right now they don't seem to want to distribute it at all. What
we need are names of people who are interested. You are not obligating yourself
to anything, just showing Prentice-Hall that there is enough interest to
publish the Mac version. Please try to distribute this news to the Mac
community where you work/study. The text of Andy's announcement follows:
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MINIX for the Apple MACINTOSH
MINIX, a UNIX V7 clone that runs on the IBM PC, Atari ST, and Amiga has now
been ported to the Apple Macintosh. The system is described in detail
(including a 250-page listing of the complete source code, in C) in the book:
Title: Operating Systems: Design and Implementation
Author: Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Publisher: Prentice-Hall
ISBN: 0-13-637406-9
We are now discussing the possibility of having Prentice-Hall sell the
Macintosh version, as they do the IBM and Atari ones (Amiga is also under
discussion). If they say yes, it will be available for around $100, including
all the source code on diskette. If they say no, we write it off under the
heading "you win some, you lose some" and throw it away. They have already
definitively vetoed the idea of giving it away or having a third party sell
it, since this might cause legal and other problems with the version they are
really interested in, for the PC (and AT, 386, etc.) A GNU-type solution is
not acceptable to them.
Their hesitancy comes from their perception that the Macintosh market for this
product is very small. A brief description of MINIX follows. Please note
that this software does not run in place of your current Macintosh
software, but rather in ADDITION to it. See below for more details. If you
would have an interest in buying it, or you are a college professor and
would be interested in reviewing the program for Prentice-Hall or using it
for a course on operating systems, please respond to the electronic mail
address specified at the end of this message. If we can collect hundreds of
names and (postal) addresses of potential customers, maybe we can convince
them it is worth doing. Otherwise the future of MINIX will be the 386/486.
What is MINIX?
MINIX is an operating system that is compatible with version 7 of the UNIX
operating system. MINIX comes complete with ALL the source code to the
full operating system and all the utility programs; source to the C compiler
and compiler tools are also available. MINIX is NOT public domain; it is
copyrighted by the Prentice-Hall publishing company.
MINIX features:
* System call compatible with V7 of the UNIX operating system.
* Full multiprogramming (many programs can run at once)
* Kernighan and Ritchie compatible C compiler
* Shell that is functionally identical to the Bourne shell
* Emacs-style, multi-window full-screen editor
* Over 120 utilities (cat, cp, ed, grep, ls, make, roff, sort, etc.)
* Over 140 library procedures (atoi, fork, malloc, read, stdio, etc.)
Additional MINIX for the Macintosh features:
* MULTIFINDER compatible.
* HARD DISK support.
* SERIAL LINE support with terminal emulation.
* VT100 virtual terminals in Macintosh windows.
Future features:
* IEEE Standard P1003.1 compatibility (POSIX)
* [Maybe] ANSI Standard C
Description of MacMINIX
MacMINIX operates on any Macintosh (Mac Plus, Mac SE, or Mac II) with
at least 1 megabyte of memory and a hard disk. [To compile large
programs, you may need more memory].
To the native Macintosh Operating System, MacMINIX is just another
application. Your Desk Accessories, Inits, and other software will
continue to function as before. If you use MultiFinder, MacMINIX will
run in its own Multifinder partition, allowing you to run your other
Macintosh programs concurrently.
MacMINIX provides a window for each tty device, and text can be cut and
pasted in and between windows. Other "standard" Macintosh windowing
operations (scrolling, hiding, moving, etc) are also supported.
MacMINIX comes with all the tools included with the PC version.
This includes (but is not limited to) the following:
animals, ar, ascii, at, atrun, banner, basename, cal, cat, cc, cdiff
chgrp, chmem, chmod, chown, clr, cmp, comm, compress, cp, cpdir, crc,
cron, date, dd, df, diff, du, echo, ed, expr, factor, fgrep, file, find,
fix, getlf, grep, gres, head, help, kill, ln, login, lpr, ls, make, mined,
mkdir, mkfs, mknod, more, mount, mv, od, passwd, paste, pr, prep, printenv,
pwd, readall, readfs, rev, rm, rmdir, roff, sed, sh, shar, size,
sleep, sort, split, strings, stty, su, sum, sync, tail, tar, tee, term,
termcap, test, time, touch, tr, traverse, treecmp, tset, tsort, tty, umount,
uniq, update, uudecode, uuencode, vol, wc, who, whoami
In addition, many more tools (ash, uemacs, jove, uucp, mail, less,
to name a few) have been made available in the comp.os.minix newsgroup.
For more information, see the book cited above or read the comp.os.minix
newsgroup on USENET. This is an active newsgroup, with all kinds of
discussions about MINIX. About 7000 messages have been posted to it in
3 years.
If you think you might want to buy MacMINIX, or are a professor who might
use want to review it or use it for a course, please send
Your name
Your postal (i.e. snail mail) address
Your email address
Your telephone number
to: archetyp@uxh.cso.uiuc.edu
Followups and discussion should go to comp.os.minix.
Joe Pickert
Andy Tanenbaum
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Pete Keleher pete@titan.rice.edu
Rice University knows nuttin about what I say, or what I do ...
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