Morrow's MICRONIX Operating System

This document was last updated April 15 2008. To return to my S-100 home page click here.

Note: as of 2008, there are several firms which use the term "micronix" in their name or for a product or service. There are too many links to list here. If you are on this Web page in error, please use Web search engines to find the "micronix" you are looking for.

Micronix

Micronix was a multitasking operating system for Z80 systems, first offered by Morrow in 1983. It was written to be "Version 6 UNIX compatible". Written in C (probably Whitesmiths C), it has a 64KB kernel and supports process spaces of 16KB to 68KB. The Version 1.61 manual I have describes it as installed on MOrrow Decision hardware, consisting of a DJDMA floppy controller, a hard drive controller of either an HDDMA (5.25-inch drives) or HDCA (8-inch drives), an MPZ80 CPU card, and a Wunderbus or MULTIO I/O card for serial and parallel ports. Memory was not specified, but is likely to have been Morrow's MM256K card with 256KB of DRAM.

The Version 1.61 manual has a Forward page which lists the developers and is dated June 30 1983. Other dates in the manual are also mid-1983.

Morrow history

My Web page on Morrow S-100 systems is is linked here. George Morrow was an early designer of S-100 cards, and with others established the IEEE-696 standard for S-100 designs of the late 1970's. "S-100" refers to the 100 pin bus for Intel 8080 and later computers, first established with the MITS Altair in 1975. This site lists over 100 manufacturers of S-100 boards and systems; here is the home page for S-100 on this site.

Micronix owners, developers

We hope to have more notes and discussions here, from the developers and other former Morrow staff. Please contact me if you wish to contribute.

Marc Kupperand I discussed Micronix in 2006. More of Marc's discussion is on my Morrow Web page.

> Iirc, The Micronix project was started around 1979 with the first
> systems being sold in 1980 or 1981.  The MPZ80 was designed for
> and used for Micronix. Micronix was a full port of Berkeley Unix 
> and not just "Unix Like." I know by 1980 we had
> Micronix running....We used the Whitesmith C compiler both for
> Micronix and for the CP/M utilities.  

> In those days we [offered code as] what is now called
> "open source" meaning we gave people the source code to stuff,
> schematics, etc. when they bought hardware.  Probably the main
> exception was Micronix as Unix belonged to Bell Labs. 

> In a nutshell the Unix source code was free to universities and was
> $25,000 iirc for commercial users.  Morrow bought a commercial license
> meaning the base [Unix] V6 code's license would have been from Bell Labs...

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Copyright © 2008 Herb Johnson