The Atari ST was a Motorola M68000 based personal computer, introduced in 1985, quite affordable and for some reason especially popular in Germany, though it also was not unseen in certain circles here in the Netherlands.
The model that probably sold best was the Atari 1040 ST. It had an 8 MHz M68000 CPU and came with a full Mbyte of RAM, which was quite a lot in those days. And even better: you could actually address all that memory from your programs, in sharp contrast with the PC’s of those days, where you had to live with 64 Kbyte segments. This and the fact that the M68000 CPU was so similar to what we used at work in our Unix boxes and workstations, made the Atari ST quite popular amongst technical and scientific users like me.
http://www.beastielabs.net/minix.html
#minix #atari #atari_st #m68k #m68000 #motorola68k #motorola68000 #addressing #memory #atari_1040ST #retro #programming #minix_st
Running 4 copies of an operating system at once
Dick explained to me that they were using an operating system from a company called Telesoft. Telesoft, headed by UCSD Pascal author Ken Bowles, was building an Ada compiler on top of its ROS (Renaissance Operating System) product. He told me (and I remember this clearly) that they had the operating system running in single user mode but that they wanted to run it in multi-user mode. At that point I was barely 21 years old. I had written a whole bunch of system-level 6502 assembler code and I had a really good ground-up understanding of the way that contemporary computer hardware worked. After studying the manual for the SUN board, I decided that I could simply break the 2MB of physical memory in to 4 chunks of 512KB each and run 4 copies of the operating system, gaining control via interrupts and device drivers.
#6502 #telesoft #pascal #ada #operating-systems #ucsd-pascal #compiler #ros #renaissance-operating-system #programming #history #computing #programming-languages #sun #intellimac #unix #msx #motorola68000 #68000 #68k #motorola-68k #ibm #stanford #research #memory
