Portable PDP-11 (was Re: Does anyone use RT-11?)

On 9/9/07, Allison <ajp166 at bellatlantic.net> wrote: I'd like to hear more about this, either on-list, if you feel your ideas are fleshed out enough to share widely, or off-list, if you are not as far along with the creative process. Ever since I had a PDT-11 (and let it go to another collector, sadly for me), I've wanted a portable PDP-11. It might or might not be easy (read inexpensive ;-) to implement an 80x24 LCD, some form of 40x25 isn't expensive at all since it only takes a 320x200 mono LCD panel. Of course, one could just have serial out from the basic PDP-11 design, then worry about a portable display as a secondary project. As for storage, obviously some flavor of FLASH is great for most things. CF is easy to interface to, and CF cards 1GB and smaller are quite inexpensive. MMC/SD are also inexpensive and even easier to interface to, with a bit more work on the driver side to man the SPI interface. While textual LCDs are cheaper and easier to interface to, the largest one I've seen is 4x40. A graphical LCD panel with a SED1335 or t6963 of a size of 640x200 would be perfect for 80x25, and, since the common graphical LCD controllers are well documented, not difficult to talk to. One could either attach the graphical display right to the T-11 bus as a peripheral and do all the work in PDP-11 software, or hang a microcontroller off of the T-11 via serial, and write some microcontroller firmware to turn the LCD into an ANSI terminal. Back to the T-11, though, if I recall its capabilities correctly, it doesn't have an MMU, and it would be difficult, if not impractical, to design an external one that resembles, say, the MMU on an 11/23... so that means RT-11SJ monitor only, correct? (or would FB be possible?) There's lots of software out there that runs in 56K or less, so I don't see that as a fatal flaw. So, Allison, does any of this sound like what you had in mind, or am I going off in an entirely different direction? -ethan