offer - OS/2 for the PDP-11

[Zane H. Healy]

> I have a WNT Alpha box (i.e. cardboard with CD and docs inside) in
> view as I type this. PPC also had an NT port. I'm not sure the MIPS
> one ever made it out of Redmond, but it did supposedly exist.
> 
> Note that those are all 32-bit or 64-bit platforms and the PDP-11
> was only 16 bits.

I fail to see what Windows NT has to do with anything.  OS/2 was originally
16-bit, and ran on the 80286.

I believe the first version or two of Windows NT shipped with x86, Alpha,
PPC, and MIPS hardware support (at least I think those were the 4 listed
architectures).  Somewhere I should have a box that says it supports all 4.

> I guess an MS-DOS or OS/2 port to the PDP-11 would be technically
> possible, possibly even feasible.
> 
> I very much doubt that it ever crossed anyone's mind to even try:
> the PDP-11 was dead well before OS/2 was ever thought of. OK, the
> last DEC PDP-11s were announced in the early 1990s and Mentec carried
> on for a while beyond then, but who in their right mind would
> consider porting OS/2 to the PDP-11 at that stage?

>From Wikipedia, development of OS/2 started in 1985, and V1.0 was released
in Decmember of 1987.  This pretty much agree's with what I remember from
that timeframe.  As V1.0 was text based, and 16-bit, it is possible that a
PDP-11 port could have existed.

Please note, I am not saying that this is OS/2 for the PDP-11, just that
such a port would have been possible in that time frame.  I can't see why
such a port would have been done.

On a related note oddly enough at least a partial port of CP/M-68k to the
MicroVAX 2000 exists.  I believe one of the list members is the one that has
done it.

Zane