Which freely available ( at least for educational use) 8-bit OS is best for networking and graphic API?
Geos? Contiki?
Can ELKS or minix be modified enough, or is there something simple with a large selection of commands available (like ELKS, minix or even DOS)?
The idea is to build a very simple little computer with an AVR or a large PIC, able to connect with TCPIP via serial or a NIC chip, and interface with an LCD and keyboard. Anything flexible enough can be used. Whats the best OS for hobby complex 8-bit computers?
Without at least 1 MByte of memory space it will be hard to cram an OS in. A tiny LCD display, say 8x40, a key board, a serial is doable, but also having a commandline interpreter doing something except interprete, eg copy, start a preinstalled app ... have a file system ...
Absolutely. My first job was on a PDP-11 with 96Kb, running version 7 Unix with four concurrent users (including a real-time device using a driver I write). I could sit in the other room compiling C programs on one 2.5Mbyte hard disk while the other users got busy on the other and didn't even notice.
We've just built some web services using C# and DotNET, and a simple ping-type RPC on a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 with 2Gb of RAM takes 33 seconds to call 100 times. That's about a *billion instructions* just for a remote procedure call guys.... Get real! People have forgotten how to program.
Its was specifically designed for 8bit MCU, its free (BSD license), its run on the AVR, and it supports both uIP and lwIP TCP stacks. However, there is no graphic API/interface.
The first OS I'm aware of was on a 8086 with an adress space of 1MB, well, only 640k was useable if plugged in. Drivers, interpreter, communication, perhaps a compiler, all in 128k with 8k RAM is a bit tight.
Rene, you aren't listening. We aren't talking about the first OS you are aware of. We are telling you that you are unaware of the many, many OSs that run great on 8-bit 64K systems.
The first Macintosh OS ran from 64K of ROM and used 128K of RAM for applications. No TCIP or NIC, but it did have a keyboard, display, and disk storage.
CP/M itself didn't require anywhere near that much. I was the envy of my friends when I got a Kaypro which had a full 64K. We really didn't know what to do with so much memory.
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Al Balmer
Balmer Consulting
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snipped-for-privacy@mojaveg.iwvisp.com (Everett M. Greene) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@mojaveg.iwvisp.com:
Commodore 64's and Apple ]['s ran Geos, a full mouse driven GUI system, on
1 Mhz 8 bit CPU's with about 48K available RAM (plus abou 16K of ROM). It could use expansion memory if available, but didn't need it. Geos later ran on unexpanded 8086 PC's, and lately became GeoWorks.
I don't remember the details, but I've seen a PDP 15 doing some amazing stuff with a vector display and a spark pen with a lot less memory. But it probably was an ap, not the os that was doing it.
If you mean a GUI when introduced, that's an unfair question. Most of the 8-bit systems were introduced prior to VisiOn (1982) MacOS Lisa version (1983), MacOS (1984), GEM (1984) or Windows 1.0 (1985) - the first commercial GUIs.
In the years since then, just about every popular 8-bit
64K system has had some sort of GUI written for it.
That's what I developed DOSPLUS/CCPLUS on. I also replaced the EPROM, which originally had anomalous connections to the bios - something to do with the DEFDMA location, IIRC. That gave me the opportunity to correct some things, such as column 80 wraparound, and provide the ability to return serial and parallel port status, etc. that enabled routine remote operation.
That machine actually had over 64k available. Another 2k lived in the video memory, and still another 2k in the EPROM. The video decoding left 80 or so bytes available in the video memory, which I could use for some ROM specific things and know they were protected until banked in. That was the last machine I had 100% under my control. If anything annoyed me, I fixed it.
The end result was a system that could run BIG programs, the equivalent of 2 Meg of 8080 code (except actually more compact PCode - also my own) in a position independent segmented system that had intersegment calls and LRU automatic segment swapping. However the data memory was still limited, due to the lack of hardware support. And the biggest code item actually run was the compiler, which was about 65k of PCD and equivalent to about 200k of 8080 object.
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Chuck F (cbfalconer@yahoo.com) (cbfalconer@worldnet.att.net)
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