Other PDP11 simulators

From: Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com>
Date: Sat Oct 2 13:24:23 2004

On Sat, 2 Oct 2004, Ron Hudson wrote:

> > What do you mean "right down on the iron"?

> The latter, or perhaps it runs from DOS but it takes over all the ports, both
> serial ports would support terminals, and the parallel port would support a
> printer. Actually it would probably have to run over some OS so that it could
> emulate hard drives as files, since the normal PDP-11 hard drive was much
> smaller than todays 60gb monster.

Hmm... do you mean, 'the entire computer becomes a PDP-11'
meaning no PCish stuff left dangling around the edges? No
WinXP or KDE or X window frames, escape keys, etc visible? No
linux/windows/etc hiding just behind a Control-C or
CONTROL-ALT-DELETE?

If so I bet with some not-unreasonable effort you could coerce a
*nix system running a simulator into doing that, certainly more
easily than M$. DOS too, but it provides no real OS services
(memory management, I/O, etc).

There are lots of small-scale linux and unix (freebsd, for
example) that you can easily scale down to the essentials,
in fact quite small, and still have: good disk/filesystem,
real I/O, memory management (virtual mem), scheduling, etc
etc... Also the *nix's don't inherently consume resources like
M$ products do (daemons and provided services can, of course,
but the beauty is you can remove them all).

Probably very difficult to completely hide, and likely not worth
the effort, would be hardware errors/failures, eg. CPU overheat,
disk drive hardware failure, etc, but once your hardware fails,
well the game's over anyways, and the *nix OSs do a better job
than most.
Received on Sat Oct 02 2004 - 13:24:23 BST