6809 SBC (was Editor religious wars (was Re: Museums))

[Jerome H. Fine]

 >Dave McGuire wrote:

> >On Jan 28, 2010, at 10:36 PM, Ben wrote:
>
>> Well if remember right a 2 MHZ 6809 with Memory Managment Unit
>> could run 2 to 5 users under OS/9 level two at modest serial
>> baud rates.( 300 to 1200 baud ) That to me is a full system. I  
>> consider a 6809,  1/3 a PDP 11 in computing power as a ballpark.
>
> And you do realize "PDP-11" spanned some two and a half decades  and 
> more than a dozen implementations with a huge range of processing  
> power ranging from "wimpy" to "big clanging brass balls", right?

If you allow an implementation done by way of emulation, then the computing
power of a PDP-11 is still increasing.  While 3rd party CPU boards (from
QED and Mentec as just two examples) were restricted to about ten times
the speed of the DEC  PDP-11/93, under Ersatz-11, I normally realize about
100 times the speed of the PDP-11/93 on an Intel Q9550 CPU running WXP
and for the disk I/O using SATA 300 drives about 200 times the speed of the
better ESDI and SCSI hard drives available with a Qbus controller to use on
the PDP-11/93.  And even a commercial license for Ersatz-11 is less than the
current price of a PDP-11/93, let alone the DEC price when first released.

What do you call 100 * "big clanging brass balls"?

Any comments from the hardware side of the fence?

So that twenty-five year span can be extended to a forty year span.

Note that there will be a number of problems in running 3rd party hardware
under Ersatz-11 since the Logical Company  no longer makes PCI <=>
Qbus adapters.  Does anyone know of a source of these boards (used at
this point)?  It is possible to write a DLL to emulate these boards, but it
may be quite time consuming for some of them.

Sincerely yours,

Jerome Fine