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

[Lionel Peterson]

On Mar 6, 2009, at 3:58 PM, Doug McLaren <dougmc at frenzied.us> wrote:

> 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!

And then wait - that post os about 18 years old...

Lionel