[TUHS] Redoing "V6on286" or porting V7...?

[norman@nose.cs.utoronto.ca (Norman Wilson)]

Brantley Coile:

  i don't know that it's a squese.  a version of v6 ran on an lsi-11
  with very little ram.

=======

If you're thinking of Mini-UNIX, it's a bit of a stretch to call
it `V6 running on an LSI-11.'  I think the original LSI-11 had no
memory management; in any case, Mini-UNIX didn't use it, but was
a throwback to the early days of the PDP-7 and the 11/20 (neither
of which had memory management).  Only one process could be in
memory at a time; to let another process run meant swapping the
first completely out of memory.

I believe there's a paper in the 1978 all-UNIX issue of the Bell
Systems Technical Journal about Mini-UNIX or its immediate
predecessor.  As I recall, there were additional compromises;
e.g. the shell quietly translated
	a | b
to
	a >tempfile; b <tempfile; rm tempfile
because that was much faster than the thrashing that often
resulted from trying to let a and b run concurrently.

Mini-UNIX might be a simpler starting point to get a system
running on a 286.  Just don't think of it as full V6; it's not.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON