How do you lift a VAX 11/780 with one hand? Load it onto an Apple iPhone!

I really hope Jason succeeds with his iPhone port of SimH as a VAX (and PDP-11, PDP-8 etc) simulator running on a mobile phone would be super cool. Never mind those geeks getting a bash shell up to SSH into a Linux box and check their e-mail with Pine, or for the hardcore, Mutt (a real ale drinker’s e-mail client). They’ll be shamefully relegated to the league of the newbie geek, as you boot up a copy of VMS or early 80s vintage BSD UNIX on your shiny ARM-powered geek swiss army knife.

When I get the chance to set up a build environment for Maemo, the first thing I’ll be attempting is to cross-compile SimH for the Nokia N800. I’m hoping this will be relatively straightforward as being a console app there will be no porting of GUI stuff to be done. One issue that may arise however is the wearing out of flash memory through the guest operating system performing frequent writes. It may be that the guests can be to an extent tweaked: virtual memory turned off or placed on a tiny RAM disk, logging disabled or set to minimum, and options such as noatime or similar specified for file systems.  And also the older more esoteric operating systems don’t tend to be so busy with their file systems anyhow, so might not cause such problems. Or another option would be to hack the device such that you can hang off a pocket USB HDD, or to possibly use NAS of some sort, e.g. NFS.