Richard writes:
> I had really hoped that the effort to bring PCI support for
> the N and A class hardware would pay off in making some of
> the transition to IA-64 easier.

It might, though it looks like PCI will be into the "legacy" category too
before very long.

> Of course, an o.s. could be designed to modularize and
> virtualize the hardware, to make porting to new hardware
> architectures easier, which, as I understand it, is modern
> Unix's claim to fame.

An emulator would be free to simulate older hardware on top of whatever the
latest and greatest might be, so as long as any new device you want to
connect to your system can be rationally viewed as some sort of device that
MPE already supports (disc, tape, 802 Lan, etc.), the emulator could do all
the translation needed to make it work.  This is one of the reasons that an
emulator capable of simulating one of the currently supported HP3000
hardware platforms may be one of the most practical solutions for keeping
MPE running in the far future.

G.

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