itsy bitsy Unix

[Scott Stevens]

On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 22:00:12 -0800
"Zane H. Healy" <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote:

> At 9:32 PM -0800 3/16/05, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
> >Does anyone know a true (not a homebrew hack) multitasking
> >environment that will run in 16K or less, preferably with available
> >source?
> >
> >I was looking at Mini-UNIX for the PDP-11 and that's something
> >similar to what I'm looking for, but I wondered what other
> >alternatives there were. Any architecture will do, but I'm
> >particularly interested in minicomputer architectures for this
> >project (DG, DEC, IBM, etc., would all be appropriate).
> >
> >Thanks for humouring my odd request ^^
> 
> Actually it's an interesting question...
> 
> RSX-11C on the PDP-11 comes to mind, I think that's the right RSX 
> version, but it might require more RAM like 32k.  Shoot, even Lunix 
> on the C-64 requires 64k.
> 
> Then again, maybe I'm thinking to new...  What about TSS/8 on the
> PDP-8?
> 
> 		Zane
> 

Back when I was in college, we ran FOCAL on a PDP-8 that didn't have a
heck of a lot of Core and it could support people on terminals (ASR-33s)
located at several spots on campus.  I think what is being inquired
about is more properly called a Timesharing System.

The hardware needed to attach multiple people up to, say, a 6502
processor made into a timesharing system would be fairly simple, but
could get silly, as the terminals people would use to connect to it
would probably have more powerful processors in them than the 6502 in
the main computer itself.  Unless something like teletypes were used.