47 pointsby rbanffy14 hours ago5 comments
  • jdswain4 hours ago
    Really good presentation, although I was nerd-snipped just by the title (which is incorrect, it's Coherent, not QNX).

    It's great we live in a time where enough information is available to restore these obscure machines, although getting the hardware seems almost impossible. I'm building up a small collection of old computers so that in 10 or 20 years when I have the time to work on them I'll have them there, I'm guessing I won't be able to afford them by then. Already missed the boat on the Lisa, probably the one computer I'd most like to have. I still remember the first time I got to use one, and the Apple employee explaining to me how to use a mouse.

    Michal showed a huge amount of persistence getting this computer going, and it paid off in the end, far from a likely outcome. I think I probably would have written a disk formatter in Z8000 assembly rather than using the terminal, but that was probably a lot easier.

    • michalpleban4 hours ago
      But how would you place this Z8000 assembly in the memory to be executed? Most likely via some script that used the terminal too, so simply calling the routines via the terminal was easier, though slower (IIRC formatting the drive took over 2 hours).
  • michalpleban6 hours ago
    The speaker here. This is not QNX. This is Coherent, a Unix-like operating system from the eighties.
    • rbanffy4 hours ago
      Sorry. Coherent and QNX happened more or less at the same time on PCs. I learned C on QNX.

      Sadly, can’t fix the title at this time.

  • rjsw5 hours ago
    A previous thread on the Commodore 900 here [1].

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29837948

  • grandiego6 hours ago
    Really great effort!!! A uber-nerdy anecdote to be appreciated by knowledgeable people. I'm feeling pretty envious :)
  • 7 hours ago
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