Sphere and another Squeak sans OS effort

John Hinsley jhinsley at telinco.co.uk
Sat Aug 11 02:12:01 UTC 2001


Dean_Swan at Mitel.COM wrote:
> 
> 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.

I may be completely wrong (it certainly wouldn't be the first time!),
but I seem to have the idea that when originally concieved, the idea of
QNS was "bigger" than "just" an embedded OS. To be sure, getting a web
server on a bootable floppy is clever (somewhere I have a QNS system on
a magazine CD, but I've never gotten around to playing with it). I
wonder if someone will pop a shrunk distro with the server from the 2.4
kernel together? (Only serves static html, but is said to be
blisteringly fast.)

Cheers

John 

-- 
******************************************************************************
Marx: "Why do Anarchists only drink herbal tea?"
Proudhon: "Because all proper tea is theft."
******************************************************************************




More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list