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As for 8086 and MMU-less unix systems, xenix is certainly not unique in this. In 90's there even was heavily modified Linux kernel that ran on such systems. An
by dfox 10y ago
As for 8086 and MMU-less unix systems, xenix is certainly not unique in this. In 90's there even was heavily modified Linux kernel that ran on such systems.
And as for 286, there were (and probably even still are in production systems) multi-user multi-tasking CP/M derivates. Two large niches for such systems were industrial automation (IIRC some versions of Siemens Simatic ran that) and point of sale (IBM).
- syntheticnature 10y agoEven beyond the 90s, in uClinux (microcontroller Linux). While it was technically bad to access hardware directly, it was definitely possible to, for example, write a bit-banging I2C driver in userspace.
- david-given 10y ago8086 Linux still exists; people are working on it: https://github.com/jbruchon/elks https://github.com/jbruchon/elks But it's still pretty unstable. If you have a spare 8086 and want a Unixoid, go look up Minix 2 (not 3). It's not very comfortable on a 8086 with 640kB, but it works. Proper filesystem, processes, Bourne shell, the lot. It even has a self-hosted C compiler. You can get real work done on it (slowly). https://www.minix-vmd.org/pub/minix/2.0.2/ https://www.minix-vmd.org/pub/minix/2.0.2/ Later versions really want a 286, but that gives you proper memory protection too. Of course, if you want any processes bigger than 64kB code / 64kB data, you need to upgrade to Minix 386.