I'm interested in that TRS-XENIX operating system from 1983:
> Derived from Western Electric's UNIX™ Operating System.
The 1983 lineup (RSC-8) is impressive - everything from handhelds to home/game systems to CP/M to multiuser/UNIX systems. It's a shame that they apparently discouraged third-party software and games.
[Writing this post on a Unix-based system from Apple, Radio Shack's less-successful competitor.]
I have a TRS-80 Model 6000 with Xenix in a closet somewhere. But I've only ever powered it up a few times and seen the prompt... even 20 years ago when I got it at the flea market, it was impossible to scrounge up the 8" floppy disks the thing used. Always meant to explore a little more with it, never did. There's a knockout in the back for an arcnet card... this thing really could be networked with more than just serial/modems. Pretty weird.
Very cool! Regarding 8" floppy drives, it appears to be possible to connect an ancient 8" floppy disk controller such as a Western Digital FD1771[1] to fairly recent 3.5" floppy drives (and older 5.25" drives) - the signals didn't change that much (though there may be some issues with RPM.)[2]
There also appear to be hard disk emulators (based on the open source FreHD[3]) available for those machines as well[14]. Xenix on emulated HD sounds like a possibility.
ARCnet is interesting. Deterministic performance, robustness/automatic ACKs, cables up to 2000 feet, still used in industrial settings. Biggest downsides seem to be lower speed and the limit of 255 nodes per LAN, but this addressing works better than Ethernet for IPv4 since the lower 8 bits of the IP address can be the LAN address, eliminating the need for complicated ARP exchanges.
I'm interested in that TRS-XENIX operating system from 1983:
> Derived from Western Electric's UNIX™ Operating System.
The 1983 lineup (RSC-8) is impressive - everything from handhelds to home/game systems to CP/M to multiuser/UNIX systems. It's a shame that they apparently discouraged third-party software and games.
[Writing this post on a Unix-based system from Apple, Radio Shack's less-successful competitor.]