How the Mac was born... supposedly...

[Gavin Thomas Nicol]

On Jan 14, 2005, at 5:56 PM, Mark Davidson wrote:

>
> On Jan 13, 2005, at 1:34 PM, Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote:
>
>>
>> On Jan 13, 2005, at 2:04 PM, Jim Leonard wrote:
>>> Anyone remember Coherent Unix?  I worked at the company up until its 
>>> demise, so I'd be happy to answer any questions about Coherent or 
>>> MWC in general.
>>
>> I think I have a derivative here somewhere for the PC9801... called 
>> "Let's C" from memory. In the same place as ASCII Minix...
>>
>>
> "Let's C" was MWC's low-cost C development system for the PC.

I have the PC9801 derivative.

The original PC9801 was *very* similar to the IBM PC (I heard rumours 
that IBM was forced by MITI to share), but the BIOS was subtly 
different. On The PC9801, the video memory was 16 bits per character, 
and there was no BIOS call to write to the VRAM... so you had to write 
display routines yourself (as an self-respecting PC hacker did). The 
funny thing is that it was possible to write an interrupt handler to 
capture character display calls, so you could actually run many PC 
programs on the PC9801.