Re: Drive speedtest PRG

Den Fri, 11 May 2018 14:44:37 -0400 skrev Ethan Dicks
<ethan.dicks@gmail.com>:
> On Fri, May 11, 2018 at 5:23 AM, Michał Pleban <lists@michau.name>
> wrote:
> > Hello!
> >
> > Ethan Dicks wrote:
> >> I would also be interested in reading about this 68008 project.
> >
> > It might also be theoretically possible to build a 68008 card for
> > the CBM-II, in place of the 8088 card.
> 
> While I do think the M68K family is awesome, what could one do with a
> 68008 in a CBM-II?  I would think it would take porting some existing
> ecosystem over to it (filesystem, assembler, probably C compiler,
> maybe a version of BASIC, utilities, etc).  And then, there would
> still have to be some effort to port any applications over or write
> them from scratch.
> 
> It sounds theoretically cool, but what would it do?  What would be the
> reason to put in that much effort?  What could it do that would give
> it some "wow"?

You ask a really good question. There aren't that much general 68k
software that runs on anything else than specific hardware (Amiga,
Atari ST, Apple Macintosh). The only software I know of is CP/M 68k
with afaik very few programs, OS/9 which should have at least some
software, and the stuff Motorola made them self (VersaDOS and whatever
else it might have been). CP/M is freeware / open source in some way
nowdays and that seems to include CP/M 68k. OS-9 is used in the CD-i
devices which seems to be still supported and commercial interests
cling on to it even though it's an outdated standard, so it might be
hard to do anything useful without either paying some heavy fees or
kind of actively support piracy. I'm not sure about the state of the
Motorola stuff. They, or whoever owns their semiconductor business now
(NXP?), seems unlikely to enforce any rules regarding the software.

If the computer had some kind of bitmapped display hardware that could
be programmed in a way at least slightly compatible with Amiga, Atari
or Mac, it would be far more interesting.

Btw there were Unix-like operating systems for 68k computers too. Here
in Sweden our then big (by local measurements) home electonics
manufacturer Luxor made computers, and were the dominant players in
small business usage before PC took over, but that was with their Z80
based computers ABC 80 and ABC 800. But they made a 68k based computer
called ABC 1600 running "ABCnix". Their DIAB partner who did lots of the
developemend also made 68k Unix computers, but more server like stuff.
They had an annoying licence model where you had to pay extra for the
simple TCP/IP commands, so they usually didn't have traceroute and
similar ;)

But I guess that those unix-like operating systems needs a MMU.

So a 68008 wouldn't be that useful. On the other hand, you could argue
that everything we discuss on this list isn't that useful either, from
a utilitarian perspective ;)


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