OT: Amiga's (was Re: [MLB-WIRELESS] Re: Small Systems was BIPAC-743: ADSL, 802.11b, 4xEthernet)

[Jamie Lovick]

Hi,

On Thu, 20 Mar 2003, Jason Hecker wrote:
> 
> Heh, no MMU.  Fair enough.  Having no MMU though is fine, you just
> have to be acutely aware that any code you run on it has the
> potential to kill the system if such things as bad pointers or stack
> overflows occur.  A recent discussion on the NetBSD mailing lists
> had people wanting MMUless support in the main branch, which is
> possible, but there is a certain amount of resistance from the
> NetBSD community - which is a shame.  I get the feeling most
> programmers these days don't want the worry of bad pointers and
> stack overflows killing the system.  Better to have an MMU to keep
> everything in order and safe.  I'll be a tad cynical here and say
> MMU's make a programmer lazy... there is no incentive to make sure
> your program doesn't exceed it's memory bounds - cosmic rays
> flipping address bits aside.  Though if anyone is old enough, the
> Amiga didn't have an MMU nor do older Macs (pre OS-X from what I can
> tell), and the amount of times these machines would crash gives you
> some idea how useful an MMU is...  are we still awake, kiddies?

I have an Amiga 3000 still running (finger uptime at bbs.doof.org for the
current uptime). Being a 68030, it does have an MMU, and a seperate
68881 FPU. The cool thing is though that wih a bit of tuning, and
leaving a bit of headroom above what you're running, it can be quite
stable. It's running AmigaOS 3.1, which has no memory protection. My
friends and I still use it for chat from time to time (telnet
bbs.doof.org if you're bored).

Regards

Jamie

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