I got a used iPhone while on vacation, and I managed to jailbreak it, and load up the CLI tools, including gcc onto it… It feels VERY unixy now with the 2.0 os, all the good stuff like screen, lynx, vi .. So I decided to build SIMH on it. It takes FOREVER to build anything… But then I don’t think the iPhone was built to compile.. -O2 seems to break so sadly it’s without optimizations but it runs!
For the heck of it, I copied in my 4.2 BSD disk image, and rebuilt SIMH with SLiRP support, and now I have a hand held VAX!
It’s cool, and pointless at the same time… I’ll probably make some binaries available on sourceforge later.. I guess as iPhones eventually get phased out (1st gen ones for sure) it’d be cool to let them become servers or something useful along those lines…
Here is a screen shot for the curious…
And yes, you can telnet into it, via the magic of SLiRP… I’ve tried building some irc clients, really old stuff does build and “work” but I think the server protocol has drifted as it cannot join any rooms…. So close & yet so far away.. I’ll probably have to move to 4.3 BSD..
I also should add that the iPhone VAX feels like an 11/780.. In that it takes several minutes to boot… Don’t expect a FAST machine…!