Date   : Wed, 03 Feb 1993 20:54:40 +0100
From   : stjohn@...
Subject: Re: 32016, (+Teletex stuff)

Do you know if the software that was brought out for Panos is
more-or-less in the public domain? (ie. are Acorn likely to press
piracy charges against people sharing what little software is around
as it's no longer available?)
I know a few people at Acorn so I'll try to get an unofficial
answer. As soon as I have that then I'll happily send copies of
Modula-2, ISO-Pascal, Cambridge LISP and the C compiler (though it's
rather dodgy as you said) for limited distribution. Certainly quite
a bit of the Pascal and C belong to NS who (I believe) distribute
the languages for free to promote their processor.

Do you actually have the Norcroft compiler because that's ANSI draft
conforming and would REALLY help. (in fact, I'd probably drop LCC if
I had Norcroft instead). As for libraries, apart from using the
existing C ones I dunno. How do you assemble the 32k code? GAS?
ASM32?

There is also room for discussion on the Pandora images as I run on
V2.0 whereas I believe others use V1. The actual Pandora system
itself is incredibly small (about 3k I think) and it really is only
an I/O support module. Initially I would try to build a
multi-threaded OS on top of Panos (probably single-threading through
Panos itself) in parallel with the development of low-level Pandora
interface libraries. Otherwise nothing is going to get off the
ground as the OS needs a decent compiler and a detailed knowledge of
Pandora and the compiler needs a proper OS to support the libraries
etc. A friend at Cambridge (Brian Brunswick, sometimes contributes
to comp.acorn.xx) managed to write a true multi-treading kernel for
the Arch which did more or less what I'd like to do with Panos so it
IS possible.

I like your idea about Smalltalk. If it's just a HardDisk that's
stopping you then I'll see how much in the way of spare parts
my brother and I have (the controller is the biggest problem: we've
got a spare SCSI/BBC interface and two spare ST506 drives but no
Adaptec to put inbetween). Otherwise feel free to mail me the source
or the FTP site I can get it from and I'll have a look at it.

Anyway, somehow I'll try to fit all this in with research and beer!

Chris