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Revision 1.22, Mon May 27 22:55:26 2019 UTC (5 years ago) by bentley
Branch: MAIN
Changes since 1.21: +20 -28 lines 

Substantially clean up and modernize HTML markup across openbsd.org.

This was done with three purposes in mind:
- to reduce the massive amount of inline HTML, to be easier on developers
  adding actual content
- to allow running the HTML validator across the source (doing this found
  many unintentional mistakes in the present code, including at least a
  dozen cases of half- or fully-invisible text)
- to separate content from presentation, so appearance can be controlled
  through stylesheets

Great care was taken to keep all pages, even very old ones, looking the
same, give or take a few pixels of whitespace.

Much review, critique, and improvement from tj@

<!doctype html>
<html lang=en id=platform>
<meta charset=utf-8>

<title>OpenBSD/romp</title>
<meta name="description" content="the OpenBSD/romp page">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="openbsd.css">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.openbsd.org/romp.html">


<h2 id=OpenBSD>
<a href="index.html">
<i>Open</i><b>BSD</b></a>
romp
</h2>
<hr>

<table><tr><td>
<p>
There used to be an "OpenBSD/romp" effort to port OpenBSD to the IBM 6150
and 6151 machines, also known as RT/PC. These machines were IBM's first try
into the workstation world, in 1986, and are the ancestors of the RS/6000
machines of today.

<p>
However, nowadays, it makes little sense to port to a machine which can not
support more than 16 megabytes of memory.
</table>

<hr>

<h3 id="history"><strong>History:</strong></h3>

<p>
Mark Dapoz and Roger Florkowski ported a mix of 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD to the
romp in the late 1980's, for educational sites not wanting to run AIX on their
machines. This port was named "AOS".

<p>
The code eventually was released to the community in the late 1990's, with
uncertain license terms. People on the list started to play with the code,
fixing bugs in it, making it compilable with gcc, and slowly filling the gaps
between the 4.3BSD era and modern times. But unless someone dedicated to this
effort ends up having too much time on his hands, a free operating system
port will never happen.

<hr>

<h3 id="status"><strong>Current status:</strong></h3>

<p>
There is currently no code publicly available, however, people used to
work on the code, and patches used to flow privately or on the list from
time to time. Nothing has happened within the last ten years, though.
Contact <a href="mailto:miod@openbsd.org">Miod Vallat</a> if you are
deluded or want more information.

<hr>

<h3 id="projects"><strong>Projects (in no particular order):
</strong></h3>

<p>
<ul>
  <li>Fix romp backend bugs in gcc, and get it working in the gcc 2.95 tree.
  <li>Write code for binutils supporting the romp, rather than fixing the
      romp-specific as and ld; eventually, move to ELF
  <li>Get hardware documentation (some is available on bitsavers)
</ul>