Subj : Re: A Modern Day PDP-11 Front End
To   : Richard Menedetter
From : Miken
Date : Fri Apr 28 2017 02:31:00

Hello Richard,

 RM> Maybe interesting to some?
.... once I know it's not Altair... count me in.

I would wish  I could be able to get to the hardware layer.

But I'm afraid without having prior knowledge and skills that wouldn't
be the case for me.

Would You be able to build / restore such a thing?

There is so much to be preserved. My ream is to visit the computer museum.

There is one in U.S. I thing. I had several hits on it while browsed the
world wide web.

But back to topic... I was a bit surprised regarding the current mainframe
MVS/380 emulation regarding it's low🐭-levelity.

I somehow has had connected huge boxed mainframe to lot of ram and latest
development approaches.

But after some examination I realized I'm emulating (correct me if I'm wrong)
system with tens of MB RAM that uses Cobol as main language.

I'm glad about it. I'm amazed with such a powerful and efficient system.

And scalable at the one of main advantage.

I'm now trying to comprehend the power of such a machine�.

And I do also try to somehow figure... where such a michines could have been
used.

I think one such a use is the NYC subway. But I doubt it runs on OS/360.

But I think I get the point where such a power could be used.

The PDP emulator is my next step. But there is one thing I'm really afraid of.
It's assembler. And I think there is no such retro-computing without asm.

The question is... whether it hasn't be used enough in the C compiler for
MVS/360.

There is something like 1000 lines of man-written asm code (that generates
the rest 100000.

When I'll try to code C Hello World ... if even ever ... I think I'll be
ready to move to PDP. I dare to ask... do You have any more experience with
it? Could I kindly ask You for any starting point?

I've no prejudice there would be anything so easy as the Turnkey is.

The topic is just very much interesting indeed. I like to open new pages of
the computer history book.

Best regards

Miken

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