[GeorgeKangas]

I had an 8-bit micro, the Tandy (i.e. Radio Shack) Color Computer ("CoCo"), made in the mid 80s.

I got an optional OS for it, called "OS9" but unrelated to Apple's OS9 (which came later).

OS9 had capabilities very similar to (and modeled on)Unix. Clearly, Linux or something a lot like it could also have run on the CoCo.

[teilo]

But the 8069 is a microprocessor (CPU). This is a microcontroller. Radically different architecture and (typical) use case.

They don't have MMUs because they are designed to directly address a much smaller ram space. On an the micro in the article, this is only 16K. They are also designed to execute machine code directly, and automatically from an on-board or external ROM, whether a masked ROM (rare these days), an EPROM, or an EEPROM/NVRAM of various kinds. They are not designed to use an OS at all.

That's what makes this so impressive.

[orionblastar]

Trs80 Coco series used the 6809 CPU that is 16 bits. The article talks about Linux on 8 bit systems.

I'd say the Mega65 might be a good 8 bit machine to port Linux to. http://mega65.com

[GeorgeKangas]

The 6809 was 8 bits, in the same way Z80 and 6502 and 6800 were: 8 bit data bus, 16 bit address bus.

It had a few 16 bit instructions: arithmetic on data in registers, or loading/storing a 16 bit register (8 bits at a time). I think the Z80 did as well.

Here's Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_6809

[jacquesm]

It also had an 8x8 mul with 16 bit result.

[timbit42]

One 16-bit feature doesn't make a CPU where every other feature is 8-bit a 16-bit CPU.

[jacquesm]

I don't think I claimed it was a 16 bit CPU.