[TUHS] Redoing "V6on286" or porting V7...?

Brantley Coile brantley at coraid.com
Tue Nov 15 08:59:09 AEST 2005


you're right.  i was thinking of mini-Unix.  my point was just
that you can do a lot with very little.

> Brantley Coile:
> 
>   i don't know that it's a squese.  a version of v6 ran on an lsi-11
>   with very little ram.
> 
> =======
> 
> 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
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