[ On Monday, February 28, 2000 at 16:32:00 (-0600), John A. Maier wrote: ]
> Subject: RE: GameBoy Port
>
> The Z8000 was Zilogs answer to the 286/386 but with Z80 looking registers   
> and instruction, though they were machine code incompatible.  It was   
> limited to 4Megs if memory servers me correctly with seperate code and   
> data space so you could go up to 8Megs.  I think it actually had a   
> protected mode of operation, so in theory...NetBSD for Z8000 sounds   
> interesting...

IIRC the Z8000 was still pretty useless for a VM OS, but the Z8002 was a
potential choice....

> I remember reading about it, but I know nothing about it.  I remember   
> reading about a multi-user unixish Z80 system around 1984, but it had no   
> TCP and rather limited functionality.
> 
> Charles Moore, of Forth fame, had a multi-user Z80 based computer in the   
> mid 80's that was rumored to be amazing.  Seems that it could   
> functionally do most everything a PDP-11 could do with only 64K!

Yup, pretty cool it was!  There were several similar competitors too IIRC.

I know someone who still might have some of the manuals, if not a
mothballed system....

It still couldn't do VM though -- just swapping.  Some variant systems
didn't really protect user-level processes from each other either (just
as some incarnations of Unix on x86 didn't either).

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
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