Which freely available ( at least for educational use) 8-bit OS is
best for networking and graphic API?

Geos?
Contiki?

Can ELKS or minix be modified enough, or is there something simple
with a large selection of commands available (like ELKS, minix or even
DOS)?

The idea is to build a very simple little computer with an AVR or a
large PIC, able to connect with TCPIP via serial or a NIC chip, and
interface with an LCD and keyboard. Anything flexible enough can be
used. Whats the best OS for hobby complex 8-bit computers?

ghazan.haider@gmail.com (Ghazan Haider) wrote :

looks the best

Pozdrawiam.
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Ghazan Haider wrote:

Without at least 1 MByte of memory space it will be hard
to cram an OS in. A tiny LCD display, say 8x40,
a key board, a serial is doable, but also having a
commandline interpreter doing something except interprete,
eg copy, start a preinstalled app ... have a file system
....

Rene
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& commercial newsgroups - http://www.talkto.net

Rene Tschaggelar <none@none.net> writes:

This is blah. Do you know how *much* one MB is?

Go back in time, there are many many examples of completely functional
operating systems that fit in a fraction of a megabyte.

S.

Stefan Arentz wrote:
Absolutely. My first job was on a PDP-11 with 96Kb, running version 7
Unix with four concurrent users (including a real-time device using a
driver I write). I could sit in the other room compiling C programs
on one 2.5Mbyte hard disk while the other users got busy on the other
and didn't even notice.

We've just built some web services using C# and DotNET, and a simple
ping-type RPC on a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 with 2Gb of RAM takes 33 seconds
to call 100 times. That's about a *billion instructions* just for a
remote procedure call guys.... Get real! People have forgotten how
to program.

Rene Tschaggelar wrote:
We did all that in well under 64k of memory 25 years ago. It was
called CP/M. One clone of that, with full source, is available at:

<http://cbfalconer.home.att.net/download/cpm>

--
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Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
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ghazan.haider@gmail.com (Ghazan Haider) wrote in message news:<1ad1e8b9.0410262117.5ba3b38d@posting.google. com>...
designed for 8bit MCU, its free (BSD license), its run on the AVR, and
it supports both uIP and lwIP TCP stacks. However, there is no
graphic API/interface.

Stefan Arentz wrote:
The first OS I'm aware of was on a 8086 with an adress
space of 1MB, well, only 640k was useable if plugged in.
Drivers, interpreter, communication, perhaps a compiler,
all in 128k with 8k RAM is a bit tight.

Rene

Rene Tschaggelar wrote:
Rene, you aren't listening. We aren't talking about the first
OS you are aware of. We are telling you that you are unaware of
the many, many OSs that run great on 8-bit 64K systems.

On 28 Oct 2004 11:30:34 +0200, Stefan Arentz <stefan.arentz@gmail.com>
wrote:

multi-tasking OS which used less than 24K.

--
Al Balmer
Balmer Consulting
removebalmerconsultingthis@att.net

In article <41810475$0$28015$5402220f@news.sunrise.ch>, none@none.net
says...
RAM for applications. No TCIP or NIC, but it did have a
keyboard, display, and disk storage.


Mark Borgerson

On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 11:27:33 GMT, CBFalconer <cbfalconer@yahoo.com>
wrote:

CP/M itself didn't require anywhere near that much. I was the envy of
my friends when I got a Kaypro which had a full 64K. We really didn't
know what to do with so much memory.

--
Al Balmer
Balmer Consulting
removebalmerconsultingthis@att.net

Mark Borgerson wrote:

The Commodore 128 does amazing things with 128K of RAM, a
48K OS and an 8-bit processor (2MHz 8502 / 4 MHz Z80).

Mark Borgerson wrote:
All of the early computer manufacturers wrote operating
systems that ran in less than 1 meg.

Clifford Heath <no@spam.please.net> writes:
Megabyte is a foreign word to many (most?) embedded applications.
64K is a big number.

mojaveg@mojaveg.iwvisp.com (Everett M. Greene) wrote in
news:20041028.7D02EA8.903D@mojaveg.iwvisp.com:

Commodore 64's and Apple ]['s ran Geos, a full mouse driven GUI system, on
1 Mhz 8 bit CPU's with about 48K available RAM (plus abou 16K of ROM). It
could use expansion memory if available, but didn't need it. Geos later
ran on unexpanded 8086 PC's, and lately became GeoWorks.

http://commodore.ca/history/company/turks_geos.htm

In article <XY6dnUanT_WQuRzcRVn-2Q@omsoft.com>, jstewart@jkmicro.com
says...
Yes, but how many of them got a GUI into 128K RAM and
64K of ROM? ;-)


Mark Borgerson

Mark Borgerson wrote:
I don't remember the details, but I've seen a PDP 15 doing
some amazing stuff with a vector display and a spark pen
with a lot less memory. But it probably was an ap, not the
os that was doing it.

Mark Borgerson wrote:
Have you shopped for a cellphone lately?

If you mean a GUI when introduced, that's an unfair question.
Most of the 8-bit systems were introduced prior to VisiOn (1982)
MacOS Lisa version (1983), MacOS (1984), GEM (1984) or Windows 1.0
(1985) - the first commercial GUIs.

In the years since then, just about every popular 8-bit
64K system has had some sort of GUI written for it.

You might be interested in reading this:
http://www.landley.net/history/mirror/gui.html

Alan Balmer wrote:
That's what I developed DOSPLUS/CCPLUS on. I also replaced the
EPROM, which originally had anomalous connections to the bios -
something to do with the DEFDMA location, IIRC. That gave me the
opportunity to correct some things, such as column 80 wraparound,
and provide the ability to return serial and parallel port status,
etc. that enabled routine remote operation.

That machine actually had over 64k available. Another 2k lived in
the video memory, and still another 2k in the EPROM. The video
decoding left 80 or so bytes available in the video memory, which I
could use for some ROM specific things and know they were protected
until banked in. That was the last machine I had 100% under my
control. If anything annoyed me, I fixed it.

The end result was a system that could run BIG programs, the
equivalent of 2 Meg of 8080 code (except actually more compact
PCode - also my own) in a position independent segmented system
that had intersegment calls and LRU automatic segment swapping.
However the data memory was still limited, due to the lack of
hardware support. And the biggest code item actually run was the
compiler, which was about 65k of PCD and equivalent to about 200k
of 8080 object.

--
Chuck F (cbfalconer@yahoo.com) (cbfalconer@worldnet.att.net)
Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
<http://cbfalconer.home.att.net> USE worldnet address!