Minix 3 vs portability - was Re: Looking for a small fast VAX development machine

[ben]

On 2/22/2016 9:58 AM, Mouse wrote:
>> Portability was a fundamental free software tenet.
>
> Is.  Was, perhaps, even, in the non-OS space.  But in the OS space, I
> think every open-source OS was originally done on some very small
> number of architectures.  Unix was done on the PDP-11 (something else
> before that, I think, but I forget what, and I think it was with the
> move to the -11 that it became portable enough to be ported instead of
> rewritten).  BSD was done on the VAX and Tahoe.  The Jolitzs' work,
> Linus's work, i386.  All of them moved beyond those initial machines,
> yes, and that was essential to their success.  But they had to start
> somewhere.

I am still playing with FPGA's here for my home brew computer
and a OS would be handy.

I still am having a few problems with design, and that is finding
just what parts where around in 1976. A nice simple 74LS design
with a 20 bit word length and 10 bit bytes. A 750 ns memory cycle
with 4k drams looks possible.

Where are all to portable compilers and assemblers source code???
Oh wait you have to pay good money for them back then?.
OH now we can't be bothered to support the small machines,
sorry no source for that. My biggest gripe for Minux
other than the racoon mascot.

Ben, computing in other than 8 bits.