18 Dec
2017
18 Dec
'17
4:10 p.m.
On 2017-Dec-12 09:40:31 -0500, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
My question about SOL got me thinking a bit. It would
be nice to have
section in TUHS of any early clones that could be collected.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is QNX - I didn't directly use it but a
colleague was using it in the mid-1980s on PC-AT class hardware. ISTR one
of my colleague's whinges was the 256-byte command-line limit.
My earliest exposure would have been Xenix on a 286 - my main recollections
are:
1) The Pascal compiler that didn't ignore comments (changing a comment
could make the code fail to compile with an obscure error.
2) The fork() system call could sometimes return -1 to the parent, even when
it succeeded - that caused a lot of head-scratching.
3) Hacking one of the Emacs clones (I no longer recall which) to use "far"
pointers for the buffers, so I could edit files >64K without paying the
performance penalty of writing "large model" code. (286 protected-mode
performance was abyssmal if it needed to do segment descriptor loads)
Unfortunately, I no longer have that code.
--
Peter Jeremy