<CT> Re: Linux or *NIX on old hardware
- From: "Martin B. Brilliant" <mbrilliant@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: calmira_tips@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 17:24:26 -0400
Ross Nelson retorted:
> UNIX started long before the 80386, though. (Unless the PDP-11 etc
> were 386's ;) ...
UNIX(tm) started long before Intel introduced the 8086 chip.
Searching the WWW tells me that the PDP-11 was a 16-bit machine with
a flat address space, and so was limited to addressing 64K. The
original UNIX must have been a lot smaller than UNIX (and Linux) is
today. UNIX soon graduated to the 32-bit VAXen, and the PDP-ll was
left in the dust -- an early example in the history of software
bloat.
Bob Groves gave us a pointer to ELKS:
http://elks.sourceforge.net/faq/FAQ-English.html
It will run on 16-bit Intel chips like the 8086, but it's a lot
smaller than Linux. But it could be bigger than the original UNIX if
it uses Intel's klugey segment-offset addressing instead of flat
addressing. If so, it's not trivial to say that "ELKS is not Linux."
And I expect ELKS to have the same problem as real-mode Win3.0: no
applications.
By the way, I too am getting those stupid "failure delivery"
messages. Only mine also say "This message contains binary or non-
textual data that cannot be previewed within Pegasus Mail" and I
have to go to "raw view" to read them.
--
Marty
Martin B. Brilliant at home in Holmdel, NJ
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