Subj : FreeBSD To : Neal Robles From : Roy J. Tellason Date : Sat Nov 17 2001 09:25 pm Neal Robles wrote in a message to William Hurn: NR> Hello William! -=> Quoting William Hurn to All <=- WH> In the relatively recent past I've seen some interest here in running WH> MINIX, the small academic operating system written by Andrew Tanenbaum WH> for University training in Amsterdam. It's available on CD in his WH> book on operating systems and from other places, including the WH> internet. It's very small and has limited features. "Out of the NR> [snipped] WH> I much more exciting product, I think, is FreeBSD. You can get it via NR> I think Minix was originally written mostly for clarity and NR> simplicity, perhaps sacrificing completeness and performance for NR> pedagogical purposes. It (or at least the version 1.2 I last used) NR> was also designed to run on old, slow and cheap PCs to allow as NR> many students as possible to build, install, and run it on their NR> own machines. NR> Although I quickly switched to Linux as soon as I got a NR> distribution (FT-Linux from What PC? magazine), I still have good NR> memories of Minix. It was my first exposure to Unix, running on a NR> dual-360K floppy XT without a hard disk when I couldn't afford a NR> better computer. You can actually run it on an XT? How well did it run? NR> It was complete enough to start learning many aspects of Unix--the NR> standard command-line utilities, C programming, multitasking NR> features, etc. The availability of source code let me examine how NR> the (simpler) utilities were programmed. Rebuilding the entire NR> operating system (not just the kernel) from the source code, NR> wasquite simple. Also, the Tanenbaum book had good discussions on NR> task and memory management, filesystem structure and security. Hm. NR> Minix reminds me of the circa-late 70's personal computers. The NR> computers were simple enough and well documented enough to let you NR> get in and learn everything and possibly modify the design or come NR> up with your own. That's one of the things I really liked about CP/M, that you could get a fairly complete grasp of *all* of it. Completely and totally, and you could also do a heck of a lot with very little, small executables, and so forth. But I started wanting to do too much in terms of actually *using* computers and too many of those things weren't possible on that older and more limited hardware and OS. The same thing started happening with dos, and I sure didn't see putting a clown suit on it as being much of an improvement, instead demanding and using up more resources for that fancy interface... And that's a lot of the reason why I've moved on in this direction. I can remember a program that I ran across that called itself "UZI". This stood for "Unix Z80 Implementation". I thought it rather odd that this "OS" claimed half of the required 64K of system ram for itself, but... Dunno if _that_ supported tcp/ip or not. :-) --- * Origin: TANSTAAFL BBS 717-838-8539 (1:270/615) .