[HECnet] PDP-11/70 on FPGA

[Johnny Billquist]

Paul Koning wrote:
On Aug 10, 2010, at 5:23 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
Zane H. Healy wrote:
On Tue, 10 Aug 2010, Brian Hechinger wrote:
On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 06:50:32AM -0400, Paul Koning wrote:
Yes, it should run most software just fine.
Excellent.
I'd personally be the most interested in RT-11 and RSTS/E.   From the sound
of things, RT-11 at least should work.
RT-11 will probably be the best use of this in it's current form.
I think RSTS/E can run reasonably well without an FPP, but I'm sure Paul will correct me if I'm wrong.
RSTS doesn't much care if an FPP is present or not.   Basic uses it if available, which makes float calculations significantly faster.

Same as RSX then, I'd say. Which is what I suspected.

Lots of layered products require the FPP though.
I remember being told that Fortran-4-Plus requires FPP, while everything else either doesn't care or can be configured either way.

F4+ out of the box requires the FPP. However, there was information in the manuals on how to get F4+ to run without FPP, with some restrictions. The same is true for F77, which later replaced F4+. (The restrictions basically being that you'lll be limited to integer operations only.)

I think F4 don't need FPP, but might also be restricted to integer only if you don't have an FPP.

That Basic+ can live without it don't surprise me, nor that it can use it if it do exist.

Having said that, the following do needs FPP, as far as I know:
Basic+2
C
COBOL-11, COBOL-81
DIBOL-11
Datatrieve-11
FMS-11
MAIL-11
PASCAL-11

Hmm, what else existed...? Can't remember offhand, but for some other products, FPP probably wasn't neccesary, while for some it is.

Then again, I must admit I don't know all that much about this.   I've only rarely used FP myself...

I can't say I use it that often, since I mostly sit and hack in the kernel for RSX, or right next to it on my TCP/IP.

I do, however, implicitly use it a lot, since I occasionally play around in BASIC+2, F77 and C on my PDP-11s, and the FPP is involved even when I'm hardly aware of it. :-)

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                                   || "I'm on a bus
                                                                  ||   on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se                         ||   Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                                         ||   tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol