j0n's place

So I urgently need a computer with a decent operating system and I have this Amiga lying around. Also, today is International Amiga Day, so using an Amiga today is probably a good idea. As NetBSD runs on pretty much anything (that has a MMU), the Amiga should do just fine. The A1200 I am using here is pretty much a standard A1200 with only a turbo card and a PCMCIA network card added. I am using a compact flash card as a hard disk replacement. I have modded it to output an S-Video signal, but that has no influence on the software. It allows me to easily and cheaply connect a normal VGA monitor to the Amiga (through a S-Video to VGA converter box) with pretty good video quality.

To dive a little into the history of UNIX, I wanted to try out some early UNIX operating systems. The original UNIX was developed on the DEC PDP-7 computer in 1969. The PDP-7's resources were so limited that the entire operating system had to be written in assembler, which was a common thing to do back then. A few years later it was rewritten in the then new programming language C. It ran on the DEC PDP-11 computers. BSD was derived from the original UNIX in the late 1970s and like the original UNIX it ran on PDP-11 computers. Later it was ported to the DEC VAX line of computers.

As it is not that easy to acquire such old hardware (and even if it was, those systems would take quite a lot of space, not to mention their power requirements), using an emulator to play with old operating systems is the obvious way to go here.