MacMinix

MacMinix

Once upon a time, I bought a Mac Plus, and decked it out with 4MB of ram, and a 40MB SCSI hard disk. I thought it was so cool, I even got a cable to talk to a normal external modem, and used it as a compact terminal to BBS, although the 800Kb floppies were a bit of a pain….

Anyways it was OK for a while but system 6 is so… limiting. Then I started using it for a foot rest, as I couldn’t do anything really more with it. Then someone at college pointed out that Minix actually supported a bunch of 68000 based machines, namely the Amiga, Atari ST, and the Macintosh!!!

The best part of the Mac port being that you didn’t have to format, repartition or anything, as it was essentially and operating environment!

The best parts being, that it had vi, and even a C compiler! Although without documentation getting things in & out of the Mac seemed impossible, and I kind of gave up on it.

But after digging around these ancient Linux things, I thought I’d take a look at MacMinix again.

To start, Brad Pliner has an excellent site, with lots of documentation for this port of Minix, including some PDF’s of the instructions.

I’ve detailed some of the install steps on gunkies.

The only real downside will be that the C compiler is ancient… It really can’t compare to MINT’s GCC.

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