Linux on an 8-Bit Micro? (2012)

Re:Linux on an 8-Bit Micro? (2012) by michrassena on Saturday April 27, 2019 @12:01AM (#19763698)

I found even a Vaxstation 3100 with the m42 cpu and 12MB of RAM was enough to work with. Sometime within the last five years, I installed NetBSD by netbooting from a Linux mopd server (because I didn't have a working 512-byte block SCSI cdrom). As a computer, it was quite reasonably usable. Not fast by any means. I didn't have anything but a serial console to work with, so no gui. I thought the best thing in the world would have been to browse the Internet on the machine, but I gave up on it because I couldn't Lynx to work.

All of this seems under-powered today, but was actually more horsepower than a comparable PC capable of running Windows 95.

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Re:Linux on an 8-Bit Micro? (2012) by neilv on Saturday April 27, 2019 @12:39AM (#19763809)

If you ever want to put VMS on that VAXstation 3100 m42, it's pretty neat to play around with. DEC people were sharp, like the Bell Labs and Berkeley people, and did a lot of things differently than Unix did. VMS was perhaps less agile, but more consistent. If you can get hold of VAX C for it, you might be amused to find that some of the documentation for system libraries has examples in BLISS instead.

BTW, don't underestimate an old workstation with only 12MB of RAM: they were often used for technical software that today people might write to require machines with 100x that much RAM.

(I did a little work on the VAXstation, for technical software. I also kludged up a gateway to one, from a TCP/IP LAN, through an Ultrix box that was also on DECnet, since no one had paid for a TCP/IP stack. A lot of important software was optional, little was free, and the printed manuals you could find were precious.)

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Re:Linux on an 8-Bit Micro? (2012) by michrassena on Saturday April 27, 2019 @01:15AM (#19763924)

I fully intend to do so. I have the VAX VMS ISO and hobbyist license around somewhere and have spent a little time fooling with it under emulation. I first used it nearly 30 years ago, and have been missing versioning filesystems ever since. For all of the strengths of Unix-like systems, notably their longevity and versatility, as I think I've written elsewhere on this forum, VMS just seems so much more fully engineered, designed and deliberate in contrast.

(It seems you had a great hack to get VMS connected. Was that used for file sharing only, or could you do more with it?)

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Re:Linux on an 8-Bit Micro? (2012) by neilv on Saturday April 27, 2019 @01:29AM (#19763963)

.iso is perfect -- TK50 drives are scary in how they operate, and I'd be scared to put a rare tape into one.

I gatewayed remote logins from arbitrary hosts, and I probably used a stock DECnet facility to transfer/share files between a VAX/VMS and Ultrix MIPS box, possibly direct to NFS volume mounted from a SPARCserver onto Ultrix. I think there was at least one NFS implementation (TGV?) for VMS at the time, but didn't have it.

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Re:Linux on an 8-Bit Micro? (2012) by linker3000 on Saturday April 27, 2019 @06:02AM (#19764785)

My apprenticeship life in the 1980s was full of TS11 and TK50 goodness - I looked after an 11/750 and a couple of MicroVAXes all running VMS.

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