Blast from the past ... SWTPc UniFLEX/FLEX os...

[Vince Martin-Smith]

In case anyone is interested I stumbled upon this this morning...
One of my first exposures to a *nix like OS was the UniFLEX OS running
on the Motorola 6809.

Kerry you might remember this box hanging around in the technicians lair
back in the ATI days.

Well these guys have emulated the original SWTPc hardware, all the old
images are there even a lot of the source from these old machines. I
still have a lot of the original hardware in storage including a 40MB
(Yes that's not a typo) western digital hard drive ... 14" discs and
took 20 minutes to thermally stabilise before you could bring it on
line.

http://www.rtmx.com/UniFLEX/

even more stuff relating to the 6809 http://koti.mbnet.fi/~atjs/mc6809/

Enjoy...



--
Vince Martin-Smith
Director
TISEC Limited
1548 Carrington Rd
RD1
New Plymouth
ph: +64 6 824 8113
mo: +64 21 0232 6846
skype: vincemartinsmith

[Graeme Jury]

Wow! that really is a treasure Vince. I built an SWTP clone with an
ST-225 HDD all 20 MB of it in the early 70's. Who would ever need more
than 20 MBytes anyway? I modfified mine so that I could recover the 8K
of ram memory that was mapped out for the OS2 operating system rom by
catching the inter cycle flag and checking the address range and
switching accordingly. I used the 8K for a ram disk and kept copy and
list etc. there for fast access.

It is all gone now except for the keyboard MKII which I built around a
Dick Smith keyboard. I can't bring myself to throw it out. The MKI
keyboard was built from keys from old calculators which I begged from
Joe Willan at Armstrong and Springhall. I laboriously cut the holes with
a fretsaw in an aluminium plate for each key to snap in and letrasetted
the characters onto each key top before polyurathening them.

Ahh yes the days when hobbyists ruled the computer world ... mumble
mumble. Gazes into space somewhat vacantly through misting eyes and
sighs heavily.

Cheers, Graeme

[Vince Martin-Smith]

hehe... the days of real hackers...
We should have a reminiscence evening some time... bring along your
oldest treasures ;)

Yep did my share of letraset work on old calc keyboards too.
Still got my old ST drives.

[David Apimerika]

Hello Vince

I've ran a couple of HDD scanning programmes across the MacBook drive. No success. They pull off files that indicate a fresh install of Mac OS X (mostly), but nothing to indicate personal files (like spreadsheets, etc).

Peter thought that Outlook may have run from a Virtual Machine of Windows. I did find a fragment that was possibly part of a VMDK file, but too small and lacked appropriate heading bytes to be a legit one.

Looks like the drive was erased and a fresh install loaded on, and then that was also erased.

We've also tried connecting to the mail server remotely at ssnnz.co.nz to try and pull down e-mail from Elliot's account, but no success (either passwords incorrect or account is disabled).

So a bit lost at this stage. If that copy of the drive you have is any good, perhaps we can try working on that.

Cheers


David Apimerika
Phone: 0-6-7579119
Mobile: 0274 579229

木魚