From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 18:00:22 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] Apple IIe Unix? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 4:56 PM Will Senn 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. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: