Nothing in there about partitioning/sectioning a new disk? That's a shame!I've got copies of the User Guide and Programmer's Guide. I keep them next to the chocolate fireguard.
It would be interesting to know what the development timeline looked like for the A680 and R140 Unices, and how similar they were at the outset (choice of NeWS versus X11, for example). According to the old info on Chris's Acorns, the A680s remained in use at Acorn long after the "Publishing System" project was abandoned. Presumably they were merged into RISCiX development (hence the support for building kernels for either A680 or Archimedes in RISCiX 1.2) and the machines that exist now might have long lost their original software. They do seem to have retained the original ROMs, so it must be possible to boot even the last versions of RISCiX with those 1988 UnixCLI/Arthur ROMs, with the right kernel.If we view the A680 more as a 1988-release R140 running RISCiX 1.00/1.01, we probably stand more of a chance of comprehending it.
That's great news, thanks! Hopefully the mysteries of the partitioning scheme for the internal SCSI with UnixCLI will soon be solved. Looking at the kernel build sources, there's a reference somewhere that "now we support variable partition sizes" or words to that effect, so perhaps they were originally fixed (as with early 4.3BSD) and then the disklabel/later 4.3BSD implementation was added later (and subsequently supported by A680 kernels as well).IanJeffray kindly came over to see me yesterday, and collected my A680 (complete with HDD).
As with anything I have, I’m very happy for IanJeffray to take a disk image and share it with the community.
Same goes for the ROMs etc.
Good luck! Looks like one of those drives with the sticky rubber endstop, I think...I need to practice with creating a big SCSI disc image with RISC OS / BlueSCSI before I'll fire up this A680 drive, so I can take the image copy right away, for fear.
Statistics: Posted by timw — Sun Feb 16, 2025 10:06 pm