richard mullins
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- Joined
- Jan 5, 2016
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I take the question to mean, can you install Unix on an 8 bit cpu?
I take the question to mean, can you install Unix on an 8 bit cpu?
I only discovered the other day that the disk access routines Apple II relied on the fact that interrupts were not being used (except for the clock which by default interrupts at about 50Hz, though clocks interrupting at 1KHz also worked fine on the Apple II). I don't know if this is true or not.
It would have been a holy grail to have multi-tasking running on an Apple II in say 1981. We would not have needed to use the disk, except from time to time, so we could have lived with the restriction of the disk routines not being interrupted (except for the clock).
However there is little incentive to put in the work to do this. (The first Apple Mac has multitasking, but not pre-emptive multitasking, according to something I read recently). It may have been more cost effective to wait for someone else to do this. The cheapest way to get multi-tasking on an Apple II on 1981 might have been to buy a plug-in card for CP/M, for which no doubt software offering multitasking could be obtained.
I had an interview for a very junior position at National Acoustic labs in Sydney in 1983. The nutbag interviewer wanted me to port a 32-bit version of unix to a 16 bit machine. He had previously claimed, in a letter written in 1981, that Mary O'Kane (now Chief Scientist, and at that time a Ph.D in computing) was available to do this work.
Richard Mullins
I take the question to mean, can you install Unix on an 8 bit cpu?
I only discovered the other day that the disk access routines Apple II relied on the fact that interrupts were not being used (except for the clock which by default interrupts at about 50Hz, though clocks interrupting at 1KHz also worked fine on the Apple II). I don't know if this is true or not.
It would have been a holy grail to have multi-tasking running on an Apple II in say 1981. We would not have needed to use the disk, except from time to time, so we could have lived with the restriction of the disk routines not being interrupted (except for the clock).
However there is little incentive to put in the work to do this. (The first Apple Mac has multitasking, but not pre-emptive multitasking, according to something I read recently). It may have been more cost effective to wait for someone else to do this. The cheapest way to get multi-tasking on an Apple II on 1981 might have been to buy a plug-in card for CP/M, for which no doubt software offering multitasking could be obtained.
I had an interview for a very junior position at National Acoustic labs in Sydney in 1983. The nutbag interviewer wanted me to port a 32-bit version of unix to a 16 bit machine. He had previously claimed, in a letter written in 1981, that Mary O'Kane (now Chief Scientist, and at that time a Ph.D in computing) was available to do this work.
Richard Mullins