hi! nothing important ;-)
Seby B.
something about minicomputers and so, but nothing really important.
first, i think modern pcs are more a kind of playstation than a real
computer. if you put a new pc with pentium-4 and a pdp-11 in front of
me, i'd take the pdp. the pc is more and more a product of microsoft and
other companies, that are only interested in making money, and not in
building good computers or programming software that really works.
nearly nobody can repair hardware today, because a board conists of few
smd-chips. 95% of all people are unable to program anything, and/or
don't even know, how a pcs works. ten years ago, it was much more
different. every pc-user knew, if he had a 16450 or 16550 as uart.
no-one feared the console and dos-batch-files. today, many people even
don't know what dos is! windows makes the current computer-generation
dumb. but if you take a look at a pdp, for example: it looks very cool,
it is big and robust, you can repair smaller defects on the board, it's
maintained from a terminal, has a great history (c and unix where
developed on a pdp-7 and pdp-11), and many other tings, its just the
coolest and greatest computer on earth! pcs may be faster, but at least,
theyre junk, aren't they? i nearly hate pcs ... i often get angry about
error x and error y, and errors, that are typical for pcs. i switched to
linux, but the hardware makes me angry too. so i decided to do it like
an good friend of me ( awinner of several computer-science related
prizes) - a build a computer at my own, from scratch. i'm at a technical
school at moment, where i learned how to deal with bits and bytes at low
level, and realized, that it's not that difficult to do even the
processor at my own. so i began to plan the processor. it's still at
work today, but there have not many month passed since the idea of the
own processor. the computer should trow aboard most pc-standards, and go
back to older standards, like serial terminals instead of a mouse, a
keyboard, and a graphics-adapter with monitor. the computer should be in
the style of an pdp, combined with a few things from here and there, a
bit from this machine, a bit from this computer ... and at least, when
it's finished (and it WILL be finshed!!!), i try to tell people what a
REAL computer is ;-) slow, but a computer, not a gaming-console. i'd
like to have a real pdp-11 at home, but we don't have so much room for
all the stuff here, and my family would never understand, why a pdp is
better as a pc. and not to forget: where get a cheap and working pdp
with all things needed to run it? i hope you enjoyed this text ;-)
so long - sebastian aka. seby
//sorry for my bad (is it bad?) english.
Brian Inglis
You could start with a PDP-11 emulator on your PC and one of the
hobbyist (often spelled "hobbiest" [sic]) OSes -- google for
emulators in this group and links to suitable OSes.
AFAIK Mentec still sell PDP-11 systems at commercial prices and
some companies out there make PDP-11 boards and chips for
embedded applications.
>so long - sebastian aka. seby
>
>//sorry for my bad (is it bad?) english.
Not bad -- very comprehensible.
Thanks. Take care, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada
--
Brian....@CSi.com (Brian dot Inglis at SystematicSw dot ab dot ca)
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Zane H. Healy
> On Mon, 13 Jan 2003 00:18:14 +0100, "Seby B."
> <spam.execut...@web.de> wrote:
>>all the stuff here, and my family would never understand, why a pdp is
>>better as a pc. and not to forget: where get a cheap and working pdp
>>with all things needed to run it? i hope you enjoyed this text ;-)
> You could start with a PDP-11 emulator on your PC and one of the
> hobbyist (often spelled "hobbiest" [sic]) OSes -- google for
> emulators in this group and links to suitable OSes.
A good starting point for PDP-11 emulation is the following webpage:
http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/pdp11emu.html
Unfortunalty the PDP-11 emulation page isn't as complete as some of the
other pages such as the PDP-10 page, because I feel it's better that I don't
link to some of the PDP-11 material that is online.
Zane
Seby B.
im currently running bob's simh-pdp11. it works great, but i'm missing
the feeling of the old hardware ;-) btw, i started to work on an
emulator for my own processor, to test some special features of the
architecture. but i don't know, if it's worth the time. i mean, it's
easier to build the hardware, but on the other side in this way i can
evade errors in the design, that are hard to find ... what do you (all)
think, should i continue programming?
bye
sebastian
Francesco Frigo
I suggest you continue programming... surely software is much more
flexible than hardware. So you may even realise you are missing out
something, or maybe you'll want to implement something else as well; this
is easily accomplished by means of software.
By the way, some time ago, I started a little virtual processor project
called XVM for "eXtended Virtual Machine", but it was just a way to have
some fun, it's not a real project I keep working on.
I wrote the "Virtual Machine" which interprets a compiled op-code, and an
assembler for it, so I don't have to assemble every single program by
hand. It's ugly... I wrote it during a weekend, but it works! :-)
All the best!
Franky
> bye
> sebastian