[mdlug] Completely replacing Windows 98se with Linux!

[Aaron Kulkis]

Ingles, Raymond wrote:
>> From: Aaron Kulkis
>> Subject: Re: [mdlug] Completely replacing Windows 98se with Linux!
>
>> And as time goes on, there is less and less interest in maintaining the code to emulate ancient sound cards
 > such as the Ad-Lib, and similarly, almost no interest in emulating ancient graphics cards.
>
> Do you perhaps mean "supporting" instead of emulating there?


Ooops.  yes.


 > To run older software in emulation, one or two common hardware variations is usually all that's needed.
 > To run newer software on older hardware, you need specific drivers. Even the latest Linux kernel supports
 > the ISA bus, for example, though it's hardly used these days outside of some industrial control equipment.
>
> But support for floppy tapes was removed from the kernel in ~2006. Nobody would step up to maintain it,
 > and make the driver work with SMP systems, for example.
>
> Hence, why I'm not going to try to install a recent Linux on the ancient machine I mentioned before.
>

Yeah... the DP-11 was a very nice machine
and the VAX-11 instruction set and architecture was insanely beautiful, but ultimately, the very
essence of its beauty was also caused it to have incredibly lousy performance when running with
virtual memory (and the VA in VAX stands for VIRTUAL ADDRESS!)

I have emulators for a lot of old architectures on my openSUSE installation...including a PDP-11
with what is supposed to be a working version of Unix... and I still haven't even fired it up to
see how far I can get with it.

Unless you have some weird piece of hardware with unique capabilities for which there is no acceptable
substitute with the capabilities of modern hardware, I think running these old machines is kinda pointless.

It's too bad that we're stuck with the 80x86 instruction set.

Object code an 8080 (from which the 80x86 instruction set is derived) is straight forward.

Object code on a Motorola 6809 or PDP-11 is pure elegance.