[SC.LUG] Home Brew

[John Southern]

On Thursday 23 October 2008 23:17:32 Josh Paetzel wrote:
> Frank Mitchell wrote:
> The curmudgeon in me can't help but note running UNIX on a homebrewed
> machine wasn't really possible until the 90's.  
> So I'm faced with two 
> interpretations, either the OP considers the 90's earlier days, or he's
> talking about the decade previous to that, when people built homebrewed
> machines to run DOS and CP/M and UNIX ran on hardware too expensive to
> bring home.

Almost agree, but I think you are a decade out.
The seventies was about getting anything to work hardware wise.
In the eighties we had Minix for the Sinclair QL in 1988 for £400. Mind you, 
£400 then was real money.
Prior to that I remember using TRS-Xenix on a Tandy 16 but memory is slipping 
to exactly when. I am sure it was around 1984 but possible late 1983.
I am sure Xenix was released for any 68000 processors. Again that would have 
been around 1983.
Alsot in 1984 did we not have a service where you could buy time to run on 
Unix systems via Prestel using a VTX5000 modems?

To put things in a proper timeline, Riscix ran on a r140?? which in 1989 was 
about £4K and superceded the Arthur OS.

Anyone else remember Coherent with MGR rather than X11?

> If it's the former....I feel old.

Now I really feel old :-(

John