More on Pi based net/internet radio music player

"Quote: No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer. 640K ought to be enough for anybody." Date: 1981

Bill Gates has faithfully denied he never said this, but the quote has taken on a life of its own and become synonymous with the Microsoft founder. Supposedly, he was quoted at a computer trade show in support of the IBM PC's 640KB RAM limit, which he'd been heavily promoting that year. Chances are he might have been misquoted, having originally said, "640K ought to be enough for anybody" at the time. A feature on the Huntsville Times website notes Gates response to the remark: "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time." The majority agress he said something along the lines of 640KB of RAM sufficing for PC users. Take the L and move forward."

- that's about the best I can find, but note that IBM PCs in that era did have a physical limit of 640KB on the ram that could be installed.

I do now wonder, though, if their display cards back then were memory- mapped and if so, how much of the unusable 360 KB of memory space they occupied.

Yup. A Pi would definitely outrun a PDP/11 And probably a VAX too.

Yes, they were.

IIRC there was addressing for 1MB of RAM, and the Bios sat at the very top, and DOS addressed the fisrt 640k opnly, with video being above that along with other perpiheral cards.

I/O of course in Intel is not memory mapped.

Later on the extra mameory could be mapped in.. before 32 bits came along and the whole sorry mess was consigned to the dustbin of history

I run an emulated VAX and VMS on a Pi using SimH

will outperform sevenfold a VAX11-780 costing several hundred thousand pounds in today?s money, even with the software overheads of emulating the VAX computer architecture on a very different hardware.

Wonderful! best use for a Pi yet! Does it run actual VMS?

Yes, I run VMS 7.3 which is still available under a hobbyist licence from HPE, along with downloads of install media, and docs. The emulation of SimH is bit perfect - I took a bit by bit copy of a complete 25 year old VAX disk into a single file on the Pi, point SIMH at it and say Boot, and I have a running VMS system. Or you can build your own VAX from scratch using the install media.

What?s more, I can run this as boot node of a VMScluster, and boot other Pis as diskless satellites across a modern Ethernet network, sharing a common filesystem with cluster-wide file locking etc. SIMH will even emulate the graphics of a VAXstation, running X and Motif window system.

An amazing piece of software created by Bob Supnik and enhanced by others as open source.

On Mon, 4 Feb 2019 16:43:55 +0000, The Natural Philosopher declaimed the following:

That is very pleasing somehow.

Somewhere there is or was a nuclear power station that relies on IIRC a PDP/11

Pi should be able to emulate that falling off a log.

Bet it could run DOS faster than an AT too. With intel 8088 emulation.

Try with dosbox or qemu like this guy

I've not run dosbox on a pi, but on a minimac ppc, and played pinball fantasies on it around 2005. I guess the cpu is comparable (ppc g4, 1.25 GHz + 512 RAM) to a new raspberry.

IIRC a

That may be so, but I wouldn't want to trust an SD card for that application.

---druck

well boot from USB then!