ooh, there's an idea for new project...
I also have a soft spot for the old PDP11 architecture and aesthetics, and like the idea of an emulator sitting behind an 11/70 front panel, but I havn't been able to decide what software to run on it...
Unix ran quite nicely on an 11/70 back in the late 70s, but I doubt you would squeeze much more than the boot loader of a modern bloated system onto one.... And a Unix image from that era would probably be a little limited. (I don't really have enough history with RT11/RSTS to want to use them).
So the question is... is plan9 still lean and mean enough to fit onto a machine with a 64K address space? Doing a port would certainly provide plenty of opportunity to tinker with the lights and switches on front panel, and if it the port was initially limited to being a CPU server, there would be no need to worry about displays and mass storage.... just the compiler back end and low level kernel support.
Has anyone already looked at that? I expect it would be a fun, educational and nostalgic exercise, but of course not of much practical use...
Regards,
DigbyT