Sphere and another Squeak sans OS effort

Dean_Swan at Mitel.COM Dean_Swan at Mitel.COM
Fri Aug 10 22:55:38 UTC 2001


From:  Dean Swan at MITEL on 08/10/2001 06:55 PM

John Hinsley wrote:

>>
>> 1. DOS
>> 2. Minix
>> 3. Mac OS
>> 4. QNX
>> 5. BeOS
>
>Interesting that all the OSs you mention (with the exception of Mac OS
>-- wonder how much longer they'll continue to support that?) have pretty
>much made it into oblivion. BeOS struggles on, and I hear that Caldera
>(or a branch of Caldera) are still doing some interesting stuff with
>DRDOS, but really......

John,

     Why do you say QNX has "pretty much made it into oblivion"?  As far as I
know it is a very robust, distributed, POSIX compliant Real-Time Operating
System that is widely used and respected in the embedded systems world.  It has
also been ported to processors other than x86 of late, and I believe that
Motorola Semiconductor has partnered up with QSS for RTOS support.

     QNX was never much of an end user OS, but it has been popular with it's
target audience (i.e. embedded systems) for over a decade now.  Have you ever
seen their "Web Browser on a bootable 1.4M floppy" demo?  That's a respectable
achievement.  I hope I may one day be able to replicate it with Squeak, but just
getting Squeak pared
down to fit on a floppy is quite a challenge.  I've been looking at this for a
while now.  I'm looking to get Squeak running on the Gameboy Advance, and just
getting a usable image that can run out of some combination of 8 or 16 megabytes
of FLASH and 256 or 512 Kbytes of RAM is a bit of a challenge.


                                              -Dean Swan
                                              dean_swan at mitel.com


P.S.  Tim, if you're reading this, think 16.78 MHz ARM7/thumb with decent
graphics hardware and nice direct sunlight viewable color LCD, available at your
local Walmart for $90.  This thing just begs to have Squeak running on it.  Ok,
so the FLASH cartridge will set you back another $60, but still less than 1/3
the cost of an iPaq.

I've just about given up on the Psion.  Their blasted "no global variables"
limitation will be the death of them yet.  It just makes porting existing code
too unpleasant.






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