Next lest squabble about whether Hollerith is better than ebcdic.
I don't get that. Hollerith is the coding on the punch card, EBCDIC is the coding in the
Paper tape vs. punch cards, now there's an interesting culture clash. Or Williams Tubes vs. delay lines.
Only for the n00bs. I was programming a base 99/4a in assembler, what was your excuse?
I didn't know you could program the 99/4a in assembler. I seem to remember that TI tried to keep the machine locked down. The underlying CPU architecture was pretty good -- 16 bit instruction set (from TI 9900 minicomputer family) so probably better than the CoCo's 6809, which in turn was the most powerful 8-bit architecture.
What I underestimated was how effectively assembler programmers could overcome the limited 6502, 6800, and Z80 instruction sets. As a compiler writer, I didn't want to touch them.
My Xenix box is actually a little older. It's a Nabu 1600. It has an 8086 CPU plus an MMU built out of TTL chips. It uses ST506 disk drives (broken now).
The filesystem is the standard 7th edition Unix filesystem. Partitioning is compiled into the kernel (if I remember correctly). Actually, so is disk drive geometry. This makes it hard to substitute other drives.
The original Nabu Xenix port was done by HCR, starting from Altos work done by Microsoft (and possibly SCO). Years later SCO bought HCR, but that is another story.
Xenix at this point was really 7th Edition Unix. Right down to using the Ritchie C compiler, not PCC. The system was very much like a PDP-11, right down to the limitation of 64k bytes for code and 64k bytes for data ("split I and D").
Obvious ways of getting data off this machine (might apply to the OP's machine): uucp (9600 baud is probably the limit on mine) or tar to raw floppies. Using 7th edition filesystem floppies is probably a mistake. Linux could surely read tar files off of raw (no-filesystem) floppies.
Make it myself? But I'm a physical organic chemist!
