The Swedish computer club #PD68 built Motorola 6809 and 68000 based systems in the 1980s. One of these systems, based on a 68k-based CPU board designed in Norway, runs the Idris OS, the first Unix clone.
I’ll give a talk on Idris and the PD68 machine next Friday (April 11th) at 19:00 at the Update dataföreningen in Uppsala. I‘ll show the (non functional atm) PD68 machine and an Atari ST emulator running Idris!
Lecture: Idris – Reviving an Early Unix Clone
by Michael Engel @me_
https://wiki.dfupdate.se/projekt:updateringar#upcoming
When: 2026-04-11, 19:00 CEST
Where: Svartbäcksgatan 65, 75333 Uppsala
Stream: https://bbb.cryptoparty.se/rooms/upd-0mo-m2u-aq8/join
The ideas behind #Unix have significant impact on the design of a large number of #operatingsystems. 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.
See you there!
Michael Engel
Update Computer Club