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jdswain 1 days ago [-]
Really good presentation, although I was nerd-snipped just by the title (which is incorrect, it's Coherent, not QNX).
It's great we live in a time where enough information is available to restore these obscure machines, although getting the hardware seems almost impossible. I'm building up a small collection of old computers so that in 10 or 20 years when I have the time to work on them I'll have them there, I'm guessing I won't be able to afford them by then. Already missed the boat on the Lisa, probably the one computer I'd most like to have. I still remember the first time I got to use one, and the Apple employee explaining to me how to use a mouse.
Michal showed a huge amount of persistence getting this computer going, and it paid off in the end, far from a likely outcome. I think I probably would have written a disk formatter in Z8000 assembly rather than using the terminal, but that was probably a lot easier.
michalpleban 1 days ago [-]
But how would you place this Z8000 assembly in the memory to be executed? Most likely via some script that used the terminal too, so simply calling the routines via the terminal was easier, though slower (IIRC formatting the drive took over 2 hours).
jdswain 17 hours ago [-]
Yes, very similar to what you did with the script, but I’d guess you could enter a small routine into memory with the monitor then jump to it to execute. This would be faster than serial port speed, but really not that different. In the end anything that works would be good enough.
lproven 16 hours ago [-]
> (which is incorrect, it's Coherent, not QNX).
I think that was my mistake, when I posted this to Lobsters. Sorry about that.
michalpleban 1 days ago [-]
The speaker here. This is not QNX. This is Coherent, a Unix-like operating system from the eighties.
rbanffy 1 days ago [-]
Sorry. Coherent and QNX happened more or less at the same time on PCs. I learned C on QNX.
Sadly, can’t fix the title at this time.
thijson 2 hours ago [-]
I learned it on QNX too, Burroughs ICON computer with a watcom compiler. Those computers too need to be preserved. If anyone has software for them, please upload to archive.org
It's great we live in a time where enough information is available to restore these obscure machines, although getting the hardware seems almost impossible. I'm building up a small collection of old computers so that in 10 or 20 years when I have the time to work on them I'll have them there, I'm guessing I won't be able to afford them by then. Already missed the boat on the Lisa, probably the one computer I'd most like to have. I still remember the first time I got to use one, and the Apple employee explaining to me how to use a mouse.
Michal showed a huge amount of persistence getting this computer going, and it paid off in the end, far from a likely outcome. I think I probably would have written a disk formatter in Z8000 assembly rather than using the terminal, but that was probably a lot easier.
I think that was my mistake, when I posted this to Lobsters. Sorry about that.
Sadly, can’t fix the title at this time.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29837948