[Coco] Fuzix

[Tormod Volden]

On Sat, Apr 11, 2015 at 6:28 AM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> From a user perspective, there is definitely no reason to be excited or
> interested in Fuzix.  It sounds like it offers nothing you would personally
> benefit from.
>
> However, for those of us who enjoy more technical aspects of the hobby,
> especially writing system level code, Fuzix is a huge deal.  It's the
> biggest project to bring a unix system to 8 bit systems in a long time,
> maybe ever, and it has a very famous (and very productive) unix celebrity
> behind it.
>
> Chances that fuzix will be something a user would want to put on their CoCo
> are slim, and definitely a long way out.  However, there are lots of
> interesting programming opportunities right now.   So for those types of
> people, this is big news.

Yes, there is nothing in FUZIX for the simple user yet. In fact it is
not even "officially" released.

And it will probably never appeal to those in retrocomputing that just
want to do exactly what they did 30 years ago. It is a new system. But
it might very well bring a bunch of new people to the CoCo scene.
Personally it was things like XRoar, DriveWire and the possibility of
running NitrOS-9 (a unix "like" system) that brought me back to my
Dragon, and not the idea of playing Donkey King loaded from tape
again. For many of us growing up with UNIX and Linux it just seems
fantastic to run the "real deal" on our old computers. And cooperating
with people across the machine-borders. And some really great people
too.

Now for the practical use. FUZIX is a bit more bloated than NitrOS-9,
portability and flexibility has its cost. So it probably won't be a
great multi-tasking productivity environment in 64KB. Some might say
the same for NitrOS-9 though :) For the user the access to a whole
world of UNIX tools and applications is one advantage. Of course, a
game using the FUZIX graphics API, and thus runnable on many different
FUZIX ports, won't be able to match a CoCo-optimized game when it
comes to performance. But network stacks, drivers for e.g. SD cards,
etc, will be usable along the whole board of different machines. More
people writing software that can run on your CoCo.

Tormod