[TUHS] Apple IIe Unix?

[athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton)]

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I too am a big 6502 fan.

XINU was a thing …. buuuuut it was written for a clone with weird bankswitching.  https://comp.sys.apple2.programmer.narkive.com/xN2z7e8K/fixing-xinu-for-apple-ii

As mentioned somewhere in this thread, Fusix might work or be workable with a little elbow grease but I haven’t tried it myself.  Doesn’t look like there’s a boot disk set for it.  https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX

I mean, it’s not going to feel like a modern Unix or even 211bsd if you get it working, but it might be comparable to a Mini-Unix or v6 on a small PDP-11.

Adam


> On Nov 26, 2020, at 4:00 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 4:56 PM Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com <mailto:will.senn at gmail.com>> wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> So, I'm about to get my very own Apple IIe and while it's an incredibly versatile machine for assembly language and hardware hackery, I'm not aware of any Unices that run on the machine, natively. Does anybody know of any from back in the day?
> 
> It's got a 65c02 processor and somewhere around 128k of RAM, but it's also pretty expandable w/7 slots and a huge amount of literature about how to do stuff w/those slots.
> My favorite 8-bit processor, maybe my favorite all around.  So simple, one accumulator and two index registers but it is only 64K of total address - although with bank switching more memory could be added in 4K banks on a number of Apple II's, but you have 16 address bits and worked a register that switched in and out the 4K banks. and there is of course no protection hardware nor the concept of user/kernel in the hardware.  The size of the Apple Floppy disk was rather small, and your need 3 to run things like the UCSD Pascal system to have any experience other than constantly switching disks.
> 
> There are a number of C compilers available but with its limited and fixed stack (8 bits only), so it is difficult to run programs of any size (in any language - automatics are often managed off the stack).
> 
> Running a full UNIX on it was not really possible although a few of the Unix style utilities were moved to it and a number of simple monitors were written that swapped programs in and out DOS style.   At one time, I had a fairly good version of the Bourne (V7) syntax shell we got running, but it had to be swapped in and out slowly.  That is; you run the shell, type a command, when exec is done, the shell is tossed out and the new program installed in memory. 
> 
> 

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