Lecture: Idris – Reviving an Early Unix Clone, 2026-04-11, 19:00

[zeltophil]

Hi all,

you're invited to the Update Computer Club[0] public lecture series
"Updateringar"[1]!

When:   2026-04-11, 19:00 CEST
Where:  Svartbäcksgatan 65, 753 33 Uppsala
Stream: https://bbb.cryptoparty.se/b/upd-0mo-m2u-aq8

Idris – Reviving an Early Unix Clone
The ideas behind Unix have significant impact on the design of a large
number of operating systems. In addition to more recent systems modelled
after Unix, such as Minix or Linux, early operating systems inspired by
Unix, such as Coherent, Venix, and also the Idris OS developed by the
company Whitesmiths, existed already in the 1970s. For many years,
almost the only information available about Idris was a short Wikipedia
page. This has changed in 2025 when a PD68 computer, an Idris-based
Motorola 68000 system developed as a project of computer hobbyists in
Sweden and Norway, was donated to the computer museum in Dalby.
Subsequently, an international cooperation also managed to get hold of
and run the Atari ST port of Idris, which extends the regular Idris
system by providing a version of the X10 window system. In this talk, we
give details about the recovery of Idris using emulation on different
abstraction layers. In addition, we give an introduction to the
structure of Idris for Motorola 68k-based systems with a focus on
enabling Unix to run on computers lacking virtual memory management.
Michael Engel (University of Bamberg)

The lecture is free and open to everyone.

Don't want to miss upcoming events? Subscribe to our low-traffic
announcement list here[2]!

Hope to see you there,
Anke/zeltophil

[0] https://www.dfupdate.se/en/
[1] https://wiki.dfupdate.se/projekt:updateringar
[2] https://lists.dfupdate.se/postorius/lists/announce.lists.dfupdate.se