Apple Lisa Xenix

Wow I’m surprised a few hours googleing about and I got it running….
I found this ‘idle’ emulator (“Incomplete Draft of a Lisa Emulator”
http://sourceforge.net/projects/idle-lisa-emu ), which can infact run Xenix! It also says it can run the uniplus SYSV (so says the readme)..

Searching around I found the following site:
http://unixsadm.blogspot.com/2007/12/xenix-blast-from-past-looking-back-at.html

Whas Xenix 3.0 disk images in the DART format… which as luck would have it idle cannot mount. However I found another lisa emulator, lisaem ( http://www.sunder.net/ ) which has a tool to convert the disks from DART to DC42 (disk copy 4.2). So it was a simple matter of converting the disks

lisafsh-tool.exe “Xenix OS Boot Floppy”
quit

… etc etc… ad nasium…

Then firing up idle, setting the CPU to max speed, and booting up whenver I was going to answer a question I toggled it back to 5Mhz.. otherwise it would take FOREVER to boot… lol like the ‘good old days’.

Once the boot floppy had formatted the 5mb hard disk image, and transfered on reboot I had to tell the bootloader to boot from the profile disk..

pf(0,0)xenix

And away it went. After installing the OS & the C compiler I’m left with 23 blocks free!.. which I guess for a 5mb disk, is pretty cool.. Anyways there are assorted Xenix PDF’s which can be found here:

http://www.tenox.tc/docs/

Namely these two for Apple Lisa Xenix..
http://www.tenox.tc/docs/apple_lisa_xenix_programmers_guide.pdf
http://www.tenox.tc/docs/apple_lisa_xenix_programmers_reference.pdf
It’s amazing that lisa emulators were sort of capable of running Lisa Office System, now they can run the old unix stuff… it’s still impressive.

3 thoughts on “Apple Lisa Xenix

  1. Xenix was written by M$ and ported by various computer vendors for their own architectues. For example, IBM ported it to the PC, Apple ported it to the Lisa and if I’m not wrong here maybe also to the Machontosh.
    Maybe you would like to know, as you’re into Xenix =D
    Cya!

  2. Idle may also start with a 10Mb Widget disk image instead of a 5Mb Profile… but I'm not sure the binary version permits it…
    Uniplus disks were restored using Idle and via the lisalist forum 🙂
    After that, I've installed Uniplus on my real lisa…

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