15 Nov
2005
15 Nov
'05
3:34 a.m.
Brantley Coile:
i don't know that it's a squese. a version of v6 ran on an lsi-11
with very little ram.
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If you're thinking of Mini-UNIX, it's a bit of a stretch to call
it `V6 running on an LSI-11.' I think the original LSI-11 had no
memory management; in any case, Mini-UNIX didn't use it, but was
a throwback to the early days of the PDP-7 and the 11/20 (neither
of which had memory management). Only one process could be in
memory at a time; to let another process run meant swapping the
first completely out of memory.
I believe there's a paper in the 1978 all-UNIX issue of the Bell
Systems Technical Journal about Mini-UNIX or its immediate
predecessor. As I recall, there were additional compromises;
e.g. the shell quietly translated
a | b
to
a >tempfile; b <tempfile; rm tempfile
because that was much faster than the thrashing that often
resulted from trying to let a and b run concurrently.
Mini-UNIX might be a simpler starting point to get a system
running on a 286. Just don't think of it as full V6; it's not.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON