On 05/25/2016 08:36 AM, Aaron Jackson wrote:
I just revisited the Wikipedia page for the BBC Micro Tube [1]. Apparently with a 32bit NS320 processor it was possible to run some variant of UNIX? Does anyone know anything about this? I'd be very interested in experimenting with it, if it is true.
All evidence that I've seen suggests that it didn't exist, at least in the wild, even though some documentation does make a passing reference to it (it's quoted in the BBC user manual, I believe, and I've seen it in some Acorn Business Computer marketing material).
Acorn - with involvement from Logica - certainly attempted a port of Xenix to the hardware, but it's not clear how far they ever got. I've seen a few corporate emails which suggest that they were encountering severe performance problems, both with the ns32k CPU itself and with transfer of data across the Tube link.
For Unix "on a BBC" I think the only option was System III from Torch running on a m68k "Atlas" co-processor.
cheers Jules
