[HECnet] PDP-11/70 on FPGA

[John Wilson]

From: Paul Koning <paul_koning at dell.com>

[MAIL-11]
That assumes you're not counting the earlier one that was used only
internally, written in TECO and distributed by some field office clown [...]
                        ^^^^^^^ ^^ ^^^^

Wow!   I am impressed/horrified.

OK I've had only minimal exposure to VHDL (I got a Q-bus DMA interface working
on a Spartan2 a few years ago but then got distracted by one customer emergency
or another and never came back, and have since forgotten everything) so I
should know better than to shoot my mouth off, but I've been thinking that
with the insane number of gates on modern FPGAs, it might not be all that
crazy just to do MSCP in hardware as an enormous hardcoded state machine?

Sure it'd be a *ton* of code but if it fits, who cares?   This is how I ended
up with E11 -- just start work on a giant crazy project that couldn't be
useful today and see where the technology is by the time it's all finally
ready for testing.

John Wilson
D Bit