Re: Unixisms on top of P8?

[mdj <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

On Thursday, 13 December 2012 16:04:56 UTC+10, Steve Nickolas  wrote:
> I'm starting to wonder if it might actually be possible to build a 
> 
> Unix-like environment - I mean Bourne shell and the whole nine yards - on 
> 
> a //e...maybe not multitasking though...using cc65 or some other 
> 
> compiler...

I've always felt this was quite feasible on expanded IIe's and IIc's using RamWorks compatible memory cards. I'm sure you can make it work for 'academic' purposes with 128k, but I'm not sure I see the point.

> I do have source for a number of Unix-compatible command line utilities, 
> 
> though being a lot of these are derived from Solaris and BSD they might be 
> 
> too big.  Still, might be interesting.

That's the issue. If you're going to be Unixy, the overhead of the fork() operation is going to become quite significant unless you focus on keeping essential binaries like the shell very small.

Matt