To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Willem L. van der Poel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 28 Apr 2000
Re: Elks
Dear ELKS group,
Since joining the ELKS discussion group I have read your
conversations with great interest. I have worked with Unix since
the very early days (1972 or so?) on a DEC PDP11/60 which had 2
RK05 disk platters of 5Mb and a working store of 256k. The Unix
kernel at that time could all be run in 24k, haha. So I can
appreciate the striving for bringing up minimal Linux systems on
the 8088, Z80, V30 etc. class of machine. I still have and old
Z80 (6MHz) up and running for fun. On the other hand: if I really
want to run CP/M I do it on the Simeon Cran simulator on a PC
which runs effectively 300MHz Z80 speed on my AMD K6 400MHz PC.
I had to hurry to save all available software for the Z80
from the 100 different floppy formats to the media, now in use.
I enjoyed hearing the efforts to bring up Elks on the Olivetti
Quaderno, as I own one myself. The same holds for all the efforts
on Z80 based machine. Perhaps some of you still remember XINU (is
not UNIX). There is even a book with the title XINU on this
subject. We had XINU running on Z80 years ago. Would be very nice
for you guys to look up old XINU again. If somebody still wants a
copy of XINU, please send me an email and I will see to it that
you get a copy. The same holds for the Simeon Cran simulator,
which was available here on the Shareware distribution media.
Then I am missing quite a bit of recognition of the early work in
porting UNIX in the form of Minix by the group of Andy Tanenbaum.
We still have the minix format around, but Andy was one of the
first the throw open the full source code for Minix in his book:
Operating Systems, Design & Implementation, PH, long before Linus
Torwalds made it into a full, viable system.
Originally this was intended as a farewell letter as I was on the
point of unsubscribing. I am not working in the field of embedded
software for mini controllers on Elks. There it has its place.
With the still lowering prices of PC's it sounds a bit ridiculous
to me to put so much effort in bringing Elks (or Linux) up on too
small or too old-fashioned machines. And why use Elks nowadays on
modern machines, when so many good distributions are available
for those who do software and systems development. I have tried
them all: RedHat, Slackware, Caldera, Debian. Now I run SuSE
linux at home and Debian in the office on a PC work station
coupled to the department's SUN cluster on SunOS.
On the other hand I enjoy your discussions very much and
sometimes I find a little gem in your writing. Of course I have
tried the last Elks distribution with more and often less
success. So after all I decided to stay on your mailing list.
I am a very old hand in computers. I built the first one in 1947.
My best design was the ZEBRA of which some 60 were produced. This
was a pure functional bit, microcoded machine, which ran from
1958 until (some at least) 1980! I held a chair of comp. sci. at
the university of technology at Delft for 29 years and I have
retired since 1991. But still working daily on different topics
(with Linux of course). 30 years ago I pronounced already the
adagium: Software has no intrinsic value. It belongs to the realm
of pure science. Why have Cooley/Tukey never cashed in on the
invention of the Fast Fourier Transform and why can every
beginning programmer of the FFT algorithm charge for the
copyright of the implementation? The fact that in the information
world of nowadays copying cannot be prevented in any way and is
very inappropriately -protected- by copyright law? Microsoft
would never have been so popular if really all copies of W95
would have been legally sold!
I wish you all luck with ELKS and I shall stay tuned on this
mailing list.
Willem L. van der Poel, Univ. of Tech. Delft, The Netherlands.
