21 Nov
2019
21 Nov
'19
5:16 p.m.
On 11/21/19 9:19 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 8:07 AM Brad Spencer
<brad(a)anduin.eldar.org
<mailto:brad@anduin.eldar.org>> wrote:
For a brief time a long time ago, I used a 4.3BSD based Mt. Xinu, MACH
microkernel, OS on the IBM-RT as an alternative to AOS. Ran well
enough, but was disk and memory constrained. We had source to much of
the system (or perhaps all of it, don't remember), but I seem to recall
that compiling it was a big pain. Something like you had to use a
specific compiler (perhaps referred to as High C?? hc command perhaps)
to compile some of the source. gcc had a backend for the ROMP
processor, but it had a hard time making usable binaries. I think that
some variation of pcc was the usual compiler. I remember it being
pretty stock 4.3BSD with NFS and minus YP/NIS. We used them mostly as X
terminal workstations.
"High C" (or perhaps "Hi C"? It's been a while...) was the name
of the
system compiler on AOS; I thought it was installed as `cc`.
"High C", and it was installed as cc and hc.
Some RT enthusiasts kept those machines running well
beyond their prime.
Why? I'm not entirely sure; as you say, they were memory and disk
constrained. They were also very slow.
I had one running in my basement into the late 90s, with my own self-
maintained kernel. I did a considerable portion of the bash-2.0
development on that box, and my wife wrote all of her doctoral thesis on
it (using a troff macro package I wrote to do APA style formatting). It
didn't make the cut when I moved from that house. Why did I have it?
Because it was free, and it did what I needed.
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet(a)case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/