Hi, I'm new to this list. A brief intro might be a good way to get started.
I come mainly from a Windows background, at least in my professional life.
Early days with an XT I bought the Wendin "PCNIX" system to run on top of
DOS but didn't do much with it. I was attracted by the fact that it came
with source code. Over time I've done a fair bit of assembly coding on 8-
and 16-bit Zilog and Intel chips including hand-assembly for the 8-bit
stuff, plus a smattering of C and FORTRAN and a few others. It's mainly
been in the control and laboratory instrumentation fields -- geophysical
and medical data acquisition, that sort of thing.
Why have I joined this list? I've recently become interested in Linux
(386+) to service my Windows requirements for cross-net browsing, hence
have SAMBA running on the Linux box. Been most impressed with the Linux
world and have successfully experimented with Apache and ircd to be used
later in teaching & learning environments.
The prospect of using Linux for day-to-day duties looms large with the
advent of X, office packages and so on. Which brings me to a few pre- '386
machines which could still be pushed into use given a leaner, hungrier OS
than Win 3.0 and more capable than DOS. Okay, I'm not expecting that we'll
get X happening on the <386 platforms but then you never know :-)
The thing that impressed me about the Wendin product is that it seemed to
come with a fairly "complete" set of Unix-like tools and that it seemed to
be lean in its requirements for resources. From memory, it came
pre-compiled for 3 ttys as its consoles one mainboard video/keyboard and 2
via the com1, com2 serial ports but there was talk that it could support
more than that. On an 8088 yet with a few hundred K of memory! Linux-8086
is probably ahead of that from the FAQ material I've read since it's native
booting, and some people are working on a vi port, too.
Might be time to blow the dust off one of those '86 boxes.
Cheers from Oz (Australia)
Denis
Denis Brown Ph: +61 8 9346 2973
Snr Electronics Technician Fx: +61 8 9346 3828
Department of Psychiatry
University of Western Australia
1st Floor D Block QE 2 Medical Centre
NEDLANDS 6009 WESTERN AUSTRALIA
