pdp11 CPU on S100 board?

Bob Armstrong wrote:

This is the killer with the S-100 plan. I've got a bag of T-11 chips and had considered doing something like the SBC6120 for a PDP-11, but it's pointless unless all the peripherals are also PDP-11 compatible. Unless, of course, you have lots of time on your hands and want to write your own PDP-11 OS and tools, and that'd take an order of magnitude more time than designing the hardware. You could, if you had the right bits and knew enough about RT11, just write new device drivers for RT11 and port it to S100 hardware. I'm sure there are people with enough knowledge to do that, but RT11 is _not free_. What hobbyists do in their garage is one thing, but any commercial endeavor would have to be careful about putting their name on that. AFAIK there are no "free" OSes that will run on a T11. 2bsd is your only option, and that'll need at least an F11 CPU. An F11 S-100 card would be a cool project (I'd buy one!) but it'd be much harder. F11s are a multi-chip chipset, much less well documented at the hardware pin level, and less available than T11s. There's always the FPGA route, but then the S100 becomes superfluous. You could fit a whole 11/73, including all the peripherals, into any modern FPGA without even trying and all you'd need beyond that are the connectors and level shifters.