11 May
2013
11 May
'13
12:35 a.m.
On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 06:33:05AM +0000, Ian King wrote:
TK50 drives are not unique to the PDP-11, and will also
hook up to VAXen,
Alphas and DEC MIPS machines;
Plus there are SCSI(-ish) versions (TK50Z-GA and TZ30), that will work on
any machine as long as the tape driver indulges them a little. Not to mention
SCSI DLT drives, which were a perfectly reasonable backup medium for PCs.
Lots of ways for PC data to wind up on a DEC tape cartridge.
I'd be really surprised if OS/2 was ever ported to
the PDP-11, partly
because of the dates, partly because of the difference between the segment
strategies of x86 vs. PDP-11. I can envision some MACRO games you could
play, but I can't imagine why anyone would bother. :-) -- Ian
I'm with you. OS/2 is very heavily invested in the idea of a per-process
memory area that's *much* bigger than 64 KB. The flips and twists it would
take to make it work with a 16-bit virtual address space would be awful.
Porting it to the VAX would be perfectly reasonable technically, but idiotic
from a marketing point of view.
John Wilson
D Bit