[TUHS] Unix on Zilog Z8000?

[Derek Fawcus]

On Mon, Mar 16, 2020 at 01:28:26PM +1300, Wesley Parish wrote:
> Is it still in existence?

> In the form of floppies?

https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/ftp/distrib/Coherent-0.7/

Certainly disk2 looks like it has a filesystem on it, since there are
blocks which appear to be 16 byte directory entries, presumably
inode number and 14 char name.

> Any source?

I don't know about historical sources of the time.
The availale Coherent source has a few files with z8001 in their name:

$ gzip -dc ~/Downloads/mwc-COHERENT-Source.tgz|tar tvf - |fgrep -i z800
-rw-r--r--  0 steve  staff     6521  6 Feb  1991 romana/relic/d/lib/libc/sys/mch/z8001.tar.Z
drwxr-xr-x  0 steve  staff        0 14 Jun  2003 romana/relic/d/lib/libc/stdio/z8001/
-rw-r--r--  0 steve  staff      268  9 Nov  1984 romana/relic/d/lib/libc/stdio/z8001/fgetw.c
-rw-r--r--  0 steve  staff      169  9 Nov  1984 romana/relic/d/lib/libc/stdio/z8001/fputw.c
-rw-r--r--  0 steve  staff      340  9 Nov  1984 romana/relic/d/lib/libc/stdio/z8001/getw.c
-rw-r--r--  0 steve  staff      231  9 Nov  1984 romana/relic/d/lib/libc/stdio/z8001/putw.c
-rw-r--r--  0 steve  staff     4906  6 Feb  1991 romana/relic/d/lib/libc/gen/mch/z8001.tar.Z
drwxr-xr-x  0 steve  staff        0 14 Jun  2003 romana/relic/d/bin/diff/z8001/
-rw-r--r--  0 steve  staff     8445  2 Nov  1984 romana/relic/d/bin/diff/z8001/diff1.c
-rw-r--r--  0 steve  staff     7767 23 Mar  1990 romana/relic/d/bin/diff/z8001/diff2.c
-rw-r--r--  0 steve  staff       92  8 Jul  1985 romana/relic/d/bin/diff/z8001/Readme
-rw-r--r--  0 steve  staff    17512  7 Mar  1991 romana/relic/d/bin/db/mch/z8001.tar.Z
-rw-r--r--  0 steve  staff    13929  7 Mar  1991 romana/relic/d/bin/db/mch/z8002.tar.Z
-rw-r--r--  0 steve  staff    21823  6 Feb  1991 romana/relic/d/bin/as/mch/z8001.tar.Z
-rw-r--r--  0 steve  staff    19275  6 Feb  1991 romana/relic/d/bin/as/mch/z8002.tar.Z
-rw-r--r--  0 steve  staff     6521  6 Feb  1991 romana/relic/b/lib/libc/sys/mch/z8001.tar.Z
drwxr-xr-x  0 steve  staff        0 14 Jun  2003 romana/relic/b/lib/libc/stdio/z8001/
-rw-r--r--  0 steve  staff      268  9 Nov  1984 romana/relic/b/lib/libc/stdio/z8001/fgetw.c
-rw-r--r--  0 steve  staff      169  9 Nov  1984 romana/relic/b/lib/libc/stdio/z8001/fputw.c
-rw-r--r--  0 steve  staff      340  9 Nov  1984 romana/relic/b/lib/libc/stdio/z8001/getw.c
-rw-r--r--  0 steve  staff      231  9 Nov  1984 romana/relic/b/lib/libc/stdio/z8001/putw.c
-rw-r--r--  0 steve  staff     4906  6 Feb  1991 romana/relic/b/lib/libc/gen/mch/z8001.tar.Z

I looked inside the first one, and it gives this set of files, being the library for the syscalls:

$ ls z8001/
_brk.s		chroot.s	getegid.s	link.s		pause.s		signal.s	umount.s
access.s	close.s		geteuid.s	lock.s		pipe.s		sload.s		unique.s
acct.s		creat.s		getgid.s	lseek.s		profil.s	stat.s		unlink.s
alarm.s		dup.s		getpid.s	mknod.s		ptrace.s	stime.s		utime.s
bpt.s		execve.s	getuid.s	mount.s		read.s		suload.s	wait.s
chdir.s		fork.s		halt.s		mpx.s		sbrk.c		sync.s		write.s
chmod.s		fstat.s		ioctl.s		nice.s		setgid.s	times.s
chown.s		ftime.s		kill.s		open.s		setuid.s	umask.s

I've not explored any further, but if the kernel source isn't there, I rather suspect
the 286 kernel source could be beaten in to some sort of shape to work on the z8000.

There some RCS files in there if you wish to explore further.

That still leaves you with having to come up with drivers, but there do seem to be
(some) technical docs available for the machine.

DF