4 ms·

NeXT also ran on 68k at the time.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago
And was also trying to get off of it before they stopped making hardware altogether. Motorola fumbled the ball by declaring 68k pretty much over, pushing their doomed 88k arch then killing that and moving to PowerPC just a couple years later.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  IIRC, Motorola was never able to put an 88K CPU, FPU and MMU in a single package. They were also unwilling/unable to make it inexpensive enough. A sensible Motorola would have made the price target of the low-end 88K the same unit price of a 68030.
  - rjsw 5y ago
    You might like to search a USENET archive for old posts in comp.arch. I'm fairly sure that the 88120 did combine everything in a single package.
    - 6581 5y ago
      That was the 88110. The 88120 never saw the light of day.
      - rjsw 5y ago
        The 88120 wasn't sold but apparently it did work fine before the project was cancelled. The architect of it regularly posts to comp.arch.
whartung 5y ago
My modern NeXT lament is that was had an extraordinary machine that ran Unix with a Postscript based windowing environment, and some rather remarkable applications, written in a "slow" C language, on a 25Mhz '040 with 400M of disk and 20MB of RAM. Meanwhile, getting Linux to run on a R Pi is a major endeavor. I don't know how light you can get a Unix with, I guess, X running on it today.
- icedchai 5y ago
  My first Linux box was a 386SX with 3 megs of RAM. This was in the 0.99.x kernel days. I later upgraded to a 486/100 with 16 megs. Linux (Slackware, kernel 1.0!) ran like lightning on that thing, including X and an early browser like Netscape. I would often have over a dozen users logged in remotely (telnet...) Things are incredibly bloated today.
- rjsw 5y ago
  I have run NetBSD on my Mac Quadra 950 with X, only ran a few xterms but it was fine.
- hungryforcodes 5y ago
  Love your story! R Pi seems ok these days though. Just loaded Armbian on an SD card and away it went. Descent performance even.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > Meanwhile, getting Linux to run on a R Pi is a major endeavor. I don't really think downloading a disk image and copying it to a microSD qualifies as a major endeavor.
  - speed_spread 5y ago
    Considering that a Pi CPU sill runs about 50 times as fast and has 100 times more memory than a NeXT had, whatever Unix you get running on it doesn't have to be "light" by OP's measure. With a 25Mhz CPU and 16MB of RAM, every cycle and byte has to be accounted for.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      OK, but Linux is the default OS for the RPis. They spin their own distro based on Debian.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  I did run NetBSD on my MIPS-based IBM z50 w/ 16MB of RAM, complete with ethernet and X and twm. But then a 16MB RISC Unix workstation wasn't really low-end Sadly, it wasn't possible to make it boot directly to BSD - it always needed a pass through Windows CE

And was also trying to get off of it before they stopped making hardware altogether. Motorola fumbled the ball by declaring 68k pretty much over, pushing their doomed 88k arch then killing that and moving to PowerPC just a couple years later.

rbanffy 5y ago
IIRC, Motorola was never able to put an 88K CPU, FPU and MMU in a single package. They were also unwilling/unable to make it inexpensive enough. A sensible Motorola would have made the price target of the low-end 88K the same unit price of a 68030.
- rjsw 5y ago
  You might like to search a USENET archive for old posts in comp.arch. I'm fairly sure that the 88120 did combine everything in a single package.
  - 6581 5y ago
    That was the 88110. The 88120 never saw the light of day.
    - rjsw 5y ago
      The 88120 wasn't sold but apparently it did work fine before the project was cancelled. The architect of it regularly posts to comp.arch.

whartung 5y ago

My modern NeXT lament is that was had an extraordinary machine that ran Unix with a Postscript based windowing environment, and some rather remarkable applications, written in a "slow" C language, on a 25Mhz '040 with 400M of disk and 20MB of RAM. Meanwhile, getting Linux to run on a R Pi is a major endeavor. I don't know how light you can get a Unix with, I guess, X running on it today.

icedchai 5y ago
My first Linux box was a 386SX with 3 megs of RAM. This was in the 0.99.x kernel days. I later upgraded to a 486/100 with 16 megs. Linux (Slackware, kernel 1.0!) ran like lightning on that thing, including X and an early browser like Netscape. I would often have over a dozen users logged in remotely (telnet...) Things are incredibly bloated today.
rjsw 5y ago
I have run NetBSD on my Mac Quadra 950 with X, only ran a few xterms but it was fine.
hungryforcodes 5y ago
Love your story! R Pi seems ok these days though. Just loaded Armbian on an SD card and away it went. Descent performance even.
rbanffy 5y ago
> Meanwhile, getting Linux to run on a R Pi is a major endeavor. I don't really think downloading a disk image and copying it to a microSD qualifies as a major endeavor.
- speed_spread 5y ago
  Considering that a Pi CPU sill runs about 50 times as fast and has 100 times more memory than a NeXT had, whatever Unix you get running on it doesn't have to be "light" by OP's measure. With a 25Mhz CPU and 16MB of RAM, every cycle and byte has to be accounted for.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    OK, but Linux is the default OS for the RPis. They spin their own distro based on Debian.
rbanffy 5y ago
I did run NetBSD on my MIPS-based IBM z50 w/ 16MB of RAM, complete with ethernet and X and twm. But then a 16MB RISC Unix workstation wasn't really low-end Sadly, it wasn't possible to make it boot directly to BSD - it always needed a pass through Windows CE