[TUHS] Are various DEC UNIXes targeted to address space and/or Floating Point implemented?

[ROBERT MYERS via TUHS]

My problem with this is that the build scripts for windows and visual studio haven’t been brought up to date for Windows 11 and Visual Studio 2026.  I also have to come up to speed with GitHub,  cmake, and any other requirements to build under this environment.

Since I have the 11/83 and 11/23+ machines, there is I believe Unix v6 targeting a 11/73 emulation (going from memory; had to remove a hard drive & controller as my 11/83 is in a questionable state right now).


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On Nov 3, 2026, at 6:55 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

On Tue, Nov 03, 2026 at 06:12:34PM -0600, ROBERT MYERS via TUHS wrote:
> 
> I have a 11/83 with floating point and a 11/23+ that I haven???t determined if it does.  Both have 22 bits of address space.  Both will have either a QBone or QBone Duo module.
> 
> Any issues with running Various Unixes on them?  I know the 11/83 has 4Mb of PMI memory and the 11/23+ will have emulated memory of up to 4Mb.

Other than "just because it is cool", wouldn't running whatever on a
simulator work just as well and run faster?  

Don't get me wrong, I learned assembler on a PDP-ll, Kendall Witte is who
I'm pretty sure was my TA, the instruction set was so well thought out,
he could come over, crack open a beer, look at the octal dump of what I
was running and read it like it was the assembler.  Made a big impression
on me, that's a very clean instruction set.  This crowd probably all
knows, but the PDP-11 instruction set sort of did everything in a way
that you could read it in an octal dump, there were patterns and the
patterns didn't vary.

I also loved the PDP-11 because it gave me a mental model of what a
computer is that I use to this day.  Yeah, computers today are way more
complex, but the basic model still holds true.  Can any of you imagine
showing someone x86 and saying "see, that's a computer" and expect anyone
to have a mental model they can reason about?

I liked the National 320xx series as well, it seemed like it was trying to
be a modern PDP-11 but they never worked the bugs out and it went nowhere.
The 680xx seemed like it was actually a modern PDP-11 but I didn't get
the sense the instruction set was as clean as the PDP-11, Clem or anyone
care to comment?