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Comment by mcculley | Hacker News Reader

I remember sitting in a RadioShack as a kid poking at Xenix on a Model 16 and trying to figure out how to use it. I never made any progress as it took a long time to boot whereas the adjacent Color Computers and most other TRS-80 models booted instantly into BASIC.

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Another operating system for Model 16s was RM/COS- a COBOL operating system. This was popular because it was smaller than Xenix on your 8 MB hard drive. There is not much information about it, but check out this cool catalog from 1986 (Model-II was "Tandy-6000" by this point- I see there is a punch card reader available..):

https://www.thecomputerarchive.com/Catalogs%20and%20Price%20...

I know the model 16 had a 68k, but it just seems bizarre that a version of Unix ran on a TRS-80.

The earlier Model II was the first TSR-80 with Xenix.

No, the Model II had only a 4MHz Z-80. The Model 16 (and later the Model 6000) had a 68k-series coprocessor, and Xenix ran in that (using the Z-80 for I/O).

It's not so crazy when you consider the specs of the machines Unix was developed on. A PDP-11/20 comes with 24k of memory (16k 18bit words) and 500k of drive space and was shared between an entire department full of people.

The reason Unix exists is because they couldn't afford a machine big enough to run Multics.

An 11/20 didn't give a great Unix experience though. You needed an 11/45 with a 80MB drive to support multiple users.

>The reason Unix exists is because they couldn't afford a machine big enough to run Multics.

So true, just imagine a world where multics and some unix spice would be the to-go system....like linux is today.

The model 16 was so much bigger and more powerful than the original TRS-80 that it included an entire original TRS-80, whose only job was to operate the keyboard and serial port.

Seriously 100x as much CPU power

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