6 Feb
2012
6 Feb
'12
6:42 p.m.
So, does anyone have a record for oldest or weakest
computer running
Unix? The Z80 definitely did it. Maybe the 8080 could. I don't
think the PDP-8 could.
Any of them could, under emulation if necessary,, given some kind of
large-enough storage somehow. But native? The PDP-8 probably could
not. The 8080, maybe, barely - it'd be a little like a PDP-11 without
split I/D.
I've been trying to figure out if the PDP-8 could
handle C, and the
answers I get range from "I don't know" to "Definitely not".
I'm not sure, but if you relax a few of the modern strictures a little,
such as allowing in to be only 12 bits wide and forgetting about
floating point and some of the standard library, it probably could.
Whether it could run the compiler itself? I'm inclined to doubt. At
least if you want builds to finish in finite time.
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