Running different OSes on classic hardware (Re: Re installing XP on Sony)

[Doc Shipley]

Mark Davidson wrote:

> Oh man, I would *love* to have AmigaUnix running on an Amiga... that is 
> one VERY difficult thing to find.  You know, Unix ran for years on very 
> "low-level" hardware and has usually been very snappy.  Take a look at 
> the original NeXT machines... the fastest NeXT was a 33 MHz 68040 and it 
> was very responsive.   I have an old AT&T box that runs AT&T Unix and I 
> know it can't be faster than 30 MHz, and yet it runs Oracle!

   It actually wasn't very difficult.  Of course, I just happened to 
have a tape streamer that the installer doesn't hate.

   The A3000UX had custom v1.4 ROMs and a special Zorro-II framebuffer, 
but a box-stock A3000 with (I think) 4MB+ and v2.04 ROMs will happily 
run UNIX.

   The A3070 tape drive is a firmwared Archive Viper, but my Tandberg 
TDC 4220 (and by extension probably a TDC 3600), an Archive 2150, and a 
couple others are known to work.  There's also a hacked-up install 
process available (that just builds filesystems and then blows in all 
the files with no package management at all) that will install from a 
spare disk instead of tape.

   The code is Out There, but like so much else here it's still under 
copyright, but there's nobody around to license it.

   And yes, I also have a Turbo Slab, which doesn't suck at all.  :)


	Doc