PDP era and a question

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_freegate.com>
Date: Thu Aug 26 13:28:58 1999

As was pointed out on the NetBSD list, Compaq has officially End-of-lifed
(EOLd) the VAX architecture. This follows a trend of having EOLs the -8,
-10, -11, and now VAX series.

I suggested to some folks, off list, that perhaps DEC should make the
PDP-11 architecture "open source" in the sense of allowing anyone to
produce PDP-11 capable processors but was told that Mentec has purchased
the rights to the PDP-11 architecture from DEC. What's up with that? True?
False? Kind-a true? (I know Mentec sells PDP-11 compatible computers)

Given the complexity of the 11/70 CPU it should be possible to put the
entire thing inside a relatively inexpensive FPGA these days. Given
something like NetBSD that is already multi-architecture aware, that would
make it possible to have an open source OS running on it. We could
potentially get to a system that was completely "open hardware." (ie anyone
could build one with no royalty requirements, and hackers could build them
for fun.)

--Chuck
Received on Thu Aug 26 1999 - 13:28:58 BST