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Comment by bhz | Hacker News Reader

We were demo'ing the recently created Commodore 64 port of PoP at MGC. It was funny to hear people say, "I used to play this on my Commodore" (No, you didn't.)

Funny how they finish the C64 port and now the source turns up. Glad he mentions that in his post.

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Maybe they were thinking of the Commodore Amiga version, which is the only version I ever saw.

In a similar vein someone once told me that they'd ran Unix on a TRS-80. (In case you don't know, older *nixes required a mainframe to get running.) The TRS-80 ran a BASIC prompt.

I don't know if you're just trolling or not.

There were UNIXes that ran on desktop hardware as far back as the early 80s. In particular, the certain TRS-80 models were sold with Xenix -- a port of UNIX that Microsoft did which later was passed on to SCO (the original company in Santa Cruz, not to be confused with the notorious Utah company that ended up owning the name)

I stand corrected then. I was under the impression that nix was a hog until the 90's.

The place I read that from probably was trolling.

(Then again, IIRC the original V6 source code was 10K or so lines, which doesn't really match up with that statement. (That it was a hog.) I figured it was just written in a way that needed lots of memory.)

Thanks by the way. Filling little gaps in my knowledge like that is always a treat.

Unix was a success exactly because it wasn't a hog and didn't require a mainframe. Instead it could run on PDP minicomputers (small and cheap at the time, they cost only $100k and were only as large as a small car).

OS/9 is Unix-like and ran on the CoCo (and Dragon, if you're in the UK).

I remember OS/9 fondly. It was my first introduction to a "real" operating system (e.g. not just BASIC and a program loader). Oh, and preemptive multitasking! Whoa... :-)

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