[TUHS] Lisa Xenix

[TUHS] Lisa Xenix

[Jason Stevens]

Wow I'm surprised a few hours googleing about and I got it running....

I found this 'idle' emulator ("Incomplete Draft of a Lisa Emulator"
http://sourceforge.net/projects/idle-lisa-emu ), which can infact run
Xenix!  It also says it can run the uniplus SYSV (so says the
readme)..

Searching around I found the following site:

http://unixsadm.blogspot.com/2007/12/xenix-blast-from-past-looking-back-at.html

which has Xenix 3.0 disk images in the DART format... which as luck
would have it idle cannot mount.  However I found another lisa
emulator, lisaem ( http://www.sunder.net/ ) which has a tool to
convert the disks from DART to DC42 (disk copy 4.2).

So it was a simple matter of converting the disks

lisafsh-tool.exe "Xenix OS Boot Floppy"
quit
... etc  etc...

Then firing up idle, setting the CPU to max speed, and booting up...
whenver I was going to answer a question I toggled it back to 5Mhz..
otherwise it would take FOREVER to boot... lol like the 'good old
days'.

Once the boot floppy had formatted the 5mb hard disk image, and
transfered on reboot I had to tell the bootloader to boot from the
profile disk..

pf(0,0)xenix

And away it went.  After installing the OS & the C compiler I'm left
with 23 blocks free!.. which I guess for a 5mb disk, is pretty cool..

Anyways there are assorted Xenix PDF's which can be found here
http://www.tenox.tc/docs/

Namely these two for Apple Lisa Xenix..

http://www.tenox.tc/docs/apple_lisa_xenix_programmers_guide.pdf
http://www.tenox.tc/docs/apple_lisa_xenix_programmers_reference.pdf

It's amazing that lisa emulators were sort of capable of running Lisa
Office System, now they can run the old unix stuff... it's still
impressive.