[geeks] Windows on a mainframe? Why???

[Doug McLaren]

On Thu, Mar 05, 2009 at 01:40:37PM +0000, Mark Benson wrote:

> but they ultimately missed the point of Linux itself, that it's
> extremely *portable* to no x86 architectures... ye lords.

From: torvalds at klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system
Message-ID:
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT

...

>How much of it is in C?  What difficulties will there be in porting?
>Nobody will believe you about non-portability ;-), and I for one would
>like to port it to my Amiga (Mach needs a MMU and Minix is not free).

Simply, I'd say that porting is impossible.  It's mostly in C, but
most people wouldn't call what I write C.  It uses every conceivable
feature of the 386 I could find, as it was also a project to teach me
about the 386.  As already mentioned, it uses a MMU, for both paging
(not to disk yet) and segmentation. It's the segmentation that makes
it REALLY 386 dependent (every task has a 64Mb segment for code & data
- max 64 tasks in 4Gb. Anybody who needs more than 64Mb/task - tough
cookies).

... I guess that's how you make things happen -- declare them to be
impossible!

--
Doug McLaren, dougmc at frenzied.us
`Unix gives you just enough rope to hang yourself -- and then a couple
 of more feet, just to be sure.'                             -- Eric Allman
`... We make rope.'  -- Rob Gingell on Sun Microsystem's new virtual memory