The PDP-11 drives his ESI laser trimming system. He can't just recompile the program and run it on a PC.
He would have to re-engineer all of the interface hardware that connects the PDP-11 to the laser trimming system.
The system software that drives the low-level hardware interfaces to the laser trimmer is also written in the OMSI Pascal dialect that among other things allows for direct whacking at the hardware. He'd have to rewrite the entire system software level supplied by ESI.
First, though, he'd have to reverse-engineer that software, because he doesn't have source to it. Oops!
After doing all that he could recompile his application on the PC ...
