[TUHS] UniFlex

[brad@anduin.eldar.org (Brad Spencer)]

   P.S. (sorry for following up to myself)

	   I had a look into the files, and the system comes with commented
   source code in assembler.

	   FWIW this is a full distribution, including development environment 
   (C, Cobol, Fortran-77,..), editors, kernel, VSAM database, etc... all of it 
   with source code and documentation,

	   From my first cursory look most of it is written in assemble, comes
   with sample test code and is documented enough to be understandable. The 
   pascal, cobol and fortran 77 compilers are written in pascal (!), the C
   compiler is written in assembler.

	   It looks like the environment must have been only vaguely UNIX-like
   but yet I find it mesmerizing enough considering where it ran and when. It
   adds another dimension to understand the impact UNIX had and how it spun off
   lookalikes and sprung the imagination of developers of the time expanding its
   heritage sideways.

				   j
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Wow, what a blast from the past.  I used Flex on the Radio Shack Color
Computer in 64MB of memory in the '80s for a while.  Yes, the entire thing
was assembly and some Fortran.  I did not have the source to most of it
for my version, only the compiled binaries.  The version I used ran off
floppy disks, of course, and used a strange sector layout.  Something like
17 sectors of 256 bytes, instead of the 18 sectors 256 bytes that the
Color Computer usually used.

Neat system in some ways.  Way more "professional" then is peers, except
for OS/9 from Microware.

Flex was only very vaguely Unix, however.  OS/9, which I used a whole lot
on the Color Computer and Color Computer 3, was a lot more Unix like.  I
understand that the 6809 version is floating around the Net.  It was also
all 6809 assembly, multitasking and multiuser.  Very Unix V4/V5/V6 like in
a number of ways.




-- 
Brad Spencer - brad at anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS
http://anduin.eldar.org  - & -  http://anduin.ipv6.eldar.org [IPv6 only]