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xfs in general.
Hello to you all!
Maybe nobody ever heard of them but about 10-12 years ago an US based company
called Technical Systems Solutions (TSC) wrote a multi-user multi-tasking OS
for a 6809 (8bitter!) and somewhat later for a 68000 (never had this version).
The hardware was from South West Technical Products Corp. (SWTPc). The memory
went up to 768K for the 6809 system using a clever banking system with two
high speed static 16 x 16 byte RAMS (SN74189 for the interested...) where the
4 upper address lines (4K chunks) where translated to 8 lines. By loading 16
bytes in the fastram any combination of 4 - 64 K RAM could be given to a task.
The 4 K chunks could come from anywhere in the 20 bit address space. All I/O
was interrupt driven. The complete kernel took about 24K including drivers for
DMA 8"/5" floppies, DMA harddisk via a predecessor of SCSI (SASI), 8 TTY ports
parallel printer port, serial printer port. The OS called UniFLEX was very
closely modelled after UNIX version 6/7. I never nad the real source of UniFLEX,
only via disassembly, but still you could see the the resemblance with the C
source of UNIX V6/7.
I have no idea if TSC and/or SWTPc are still in existance but now realize how
far ahead they were with their UniFLEX software running on well designed
hardware. TSC is/was located in Chapel Hill NC, SWTPc is/was in San Antonio TX.
Sorry for all this drivel but when I think of that time I wonder if MiNT on
better hardware (fully interrupt driven, good memory managenent unit etc.)
wouldn't be much better off and fit for the job. Don't misunderstand me;
I don't hate ATARI at all. I have a 520/4Mb/145Mb and a 1040/4MB/210Mb both
running TOS 2.06 and I love them and the software running on them (mostly
WORKS, GNU and MiNT).
I was in a nostalgic mood, sorry.
Egbert Jan
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Egbert Jan van den Bussche VAX/VMS SHELL Research Rijswijk,
tel. +31(0)70-3112657 ATARI Postbus 60,
Email: busscheh@ksepl.nl VAX/VMS 2280 AB Rijswijk, Holland (NL)
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