Sony News Portable Workstation NWS-1250 (2020)
randoc.wordpress.com
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> Originally the Sony NEWS team had to decide which version of Unix to use: BSD or AT&T System V. The project leader was interested in the potential commercial support for System V, but the engineering team preferred BSD because it had rich networking features including TCP/IP. Eventually BSD was chosen because they believed that computer networks would be important in the future
-- Taken from the Wikipedia related article.
Where did you got the information regarding PS 5 from?
https://wayne.lorentz.me/This_TRS-80/
It's a pretty detailed explanation of a TRS-80 running a custom Associated Press ROM.
I must have made that mental link because of the name, and because of Sony's long history of producing news gathering and production gear. (The predecessor of the Walkman was the Pressman. My first introduction to XML was a Sony media server.)
https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/news68k/
(admittedly, there's a warning for this model - 'not tested in many years')
I have fond memories of my PC's from the early 90's with RAM of 4 or 8 MB, and now am amazed that my laptop CPU has 8 MB cache.
Sometimes I wonder, if you could make an OS and useful applications that ran entirely in CPU cache.
Symbolics (who owned the first ever .com domain on the Internet) made Lisp Machines -- high-powered personal workstations whose entire OS was written in Lisp, right down to the lowest-level code. They used special proprietary processors which executed a sort of Lisp-like bytecode, enabling Lisp to be compiled down into something that ran directly on the metal -- using lists instead of the C model of bytes, words and pointers.
This is the where what is now called the "Windows key" came from: the Lisp Machine's Meta key. That's why Emacs still calls it "meta". Emacs was the native editor of these OSes.
The company devoted a lot of R&D into processor development over the years, moving from arrays of chips to single large chips to smaller chips. Their last hardware was an add-in board that fitted into 680x0 Macintosh computers and ran the Lisp machine's Genera OS in a Classic MacOS window. The code was actually executing on its own hardware in its own separate dedicated RAM and just used the Mac as a display, storage controller and network interface.
After this, the company was unable to keep up with the speed of simpler CPUs that used the C style of design. Symbolics response was to port their OS to run on the most advanced RISC chip of the time: DEC's Alpha processor, the first 64-bit RISC chip.
Symbolics wrote an interpreter for their Lispy bytecode that ran on the Alpha, enabling what was now called OpenGenera to execute as a program under DEC's OSF/1-based UNIX, later called Tru64.
This interpreter was extremely fast because it was implemented to fit entirely into the Alpha's L1 cache -- 8kB each for Instructions and Data. An 8kB runtime meant that it never got flushed while you were running Lisp code.
Now, forcing it to only use cache would be an interesting problem...
They used Windows NT on DEC Alphas, and their sysadmin was always nice to me, despite me being very much an annoying junior n00b.
Also, one NWS-1520 and another one which I imported from Japan.
Haven't gotten around trying NetBSD on these yet.
1,550,000 yen in 1990 would be about $17,000 USD today.
Actually I think the battery in my laptop mostly functions as a UPS, and is rarely used on my lap. I have a home office and used to visit other offices a lot, and the main use case for me is being able to quickly fold my workstation into a bag and take it anywhere. But I plug it in when I get there, and unless I want to code on a plane or a train (I rarely do), it's just a portable workstation.
Wow.