I was wondering when this might come to fruition. Enthusiasts are often willing to put up with a tremendous amount of inconvienience. I remind folks of this that the Altair 8800 (and IMSAI) were, in their base models, something you toggled in your machine code into directly. PDP-8's and PDP-11's had core but if you had corrupted memory you had to toggle in the boot loader to get them restarted.
On a whim I wrote a quick 'virtual machine' (which is to say an emulator) for the PDP-11 on an Arduino 328. It runs faster than a 'real' PDP-11/40 (on which it was modelled).
My thought was that you could pull a copy of 2.9BSD or V6 UNIX from the PUPS archive and build an equivalent of the same system Dennis and Ken developed C on pretty easily. Add a terminal and you're good to go. However, I recognize that if you're going to the trouble to do it you should really take advantage of modern gear.
I'm glad to see that these guys are taking that approach, Linux might be a bit heavyweight (you could do a much simpler and cheaper DOS like OS) but it does have the advantage of lots of available software.
Standard modern distros are fairly heavy, agreed. But a custom distro can be super-lightweight and still include most features you'd expect from a desktop OS. In 2003 I was running desktop redhat on an old IBM thinkpad with just 32MB of RAM. So 128 should be plenty!
One of the more interesting questions (and the Rasberry Pi creator is investing in) is 'learning about computers.' Which I truly support. (Local high school computer class was about how to use Microsoft Office, bleh!) Its one of the reasons have felt that Arduino's and their spawn are doing a great service of getting people interested in understanding what the computer is doing at a more complex level, before they open up their first kernel file and gaze upon the complexity therein.
On a whim I wrote a quick 'virtual machine' (which is to say an emulator) for the PDP-11 on an Arduino 328. It runs faster than a 'real' PDP-11/40 (on which it was modelled).
My thought was that you could pull a copy of 2.9BSD or V6 UNIX from the PUPS archive and build an equivalent of the same system Dennis and Ken developed C on pretty easily. Add a terminal and you're good to go. However, I recognize that if you're going to the trouble to do it you should really take advantage of modern gear.
I'm glad to see that these guys are taking that approach, Linux might be a bit heavyweight (you could do a much simpler and cheaper DOS like OS) but it does have the advantage of lots of available software.