[Gllug] The BBC and Microsoft.

[Steve Goodwin]

> 
> Does anyone know if a Linux (-like) system could be coaxed 
> into running on 
> one of the BBC micros (or any 6502-based) board?
> 
The closest I can remember was the 'Econet' system. It required a ROM chip
(usually 32K, IIRC) with program code, that allowed connection a common file
server on Winchester discs. It had a heirachical file system, user
authentication, a root user (called system), and talk/message system.
Probably more akin to NFS than Linux as a whole, though, since all
processing was done on the individual machine.

As for coaxing it onto the machine - I wouldn't like to try it, whereas
writing a minature version of a Linux-_like_ OS would work, but be _very_
slow. You'd have to store the PC for each task, then copy the instruction
and execute it (unless it's a jump, in which case you'd emulate it), push
all the registers & stack pointers back to your own memory area and then
task switch! (there'd also be no supervisor mode on the chip, or memory
manager making security a problem). [I wrote something for the Dragon -
remember that!? - that mimicked the file sys in memory, and allowed multiple
tasks. On a 32K machine, it could support nearly 5K of user programs!! :)] 

Finally, a humanistic point: since there's no network (as standard) on
either machine, you'd need a much larger keyboard :)

Steev



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