Actual 8-bit *nix.

Posted Mar 31, 2012 3:18 UTC (Sat) by xtifr (guest, #143)
In reply to: Actual 8-bit *nix. by Cyberax
Parent article: Grinberg: Linux on an 8-bit micro?

ELKS is 16-bit (8086), not eight, so it's not really surprising that it's a little more successful. I actually had a working 16-bit Unix-like system back in the day, called Minix, which is why I was subscribed to the minix newsgroup when this guy name Linus Torvalds posted a very interesting announcement.... :)

(I actually got Minix running under OS/2's "virtual DOS machine" at one point, which was pretty fun. Didn't work with Linux, though--not even those early versions.)

Actual 8-bit *nix.

Posted Mar 31, 2012 5:32 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Technically 8088 was an 8-bit CPU :)

Okay, okay, I'm getting off your lawn.

Actual 8-bit *nix.

Posted Mar 31, 2012 9:16 UTC (Sat) by juliank (guest, #45896) [Link]

The 8088 is variation of the 16-bit 8086. Both had 16 bit registers, but the 8088 had an 8 bit data bus and was otherwise more restricted than the 8086.

The parent post talked about the 8086, though, anyway.

Actual 8-bit *nix.

Posted Mar 31, 2012 15:00 UTC (Sat) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link]

If you consider the 8086 to be a 16-bit CPU, then the 8088 was nominally a 16 bit CPU with an 8 bit bus, given that the same code would run unmodified on both, and register to register operations cost the same on both.

Well, ok, they differed slightly in rare cases where you were doing something tricky to expose the different prefetch depths on the BIU. As I recall, that was pretty much the only way to tell the two apart in software across clock rates and system architectures.