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Programming IT Technology

The Computer History Simulation Project 147

Posted by michael from the remembering-the-bad-old-days dept.
ChunKing writes "The Computer History Simulation Project is a loose Internet-based collective of people interested in restoring historically significant computer hardware and software systems by simulation. The goal of the project is to create highly portable system simulators and to publish them as freeware on the Internet, with freely available copies of significant or representative software. I can't wait 'til someone fixes me an OS/390 emulator to remind me of the days when I used to be an Ops Analyst for a major bank..."
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The Computer History Simulation Project More

The Computer History Simulation Project

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  • At least for game-emus (Score:4, Informative)

    by Troed ( 102527 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @03:41AM (#3321864) Homepage Journal
    ... NGEmu [ngemu.com] is the best place to visit. I do play PSX and N64 games on my old old PII450 with acceptable speed ..


    And yes, my Atari ST nostalgia was revised by one of the truly great emulators around then, PacifiST. Nowadays the best emu would be Steem [strayduck.com] - try it! Little Green Desktop [atari.st] has applications to use ..

  • S390 (Score:5, Informative)

    by stu_coates ( 156061 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @03:42AM (#3321866)
    There already is a S/390 emulator [conmicro.cx]... now all you need is the OS... or you could be daring and try Linux [linas.org] on it.

    • Re:S390 (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It's too good. It exposes a bug in the Suse 2.4
      kernel which means disk writes are flakey. You need to patch the emulator, (which slows it way down), then spend a few days building a new kernel, then rebooting with the unpatched emulator.

      Tedious, but well worth the effort.

      (Yeah, it does work, and it's just fast enough to be useful).

      • The current Hercules CVS tree, as well as the about-to-be-released version 2.16, has a better way of working around this bug: there's a configuration statement, IODELAY, that lets you add the delay without having to recompile.
    • There is also an S/390 emulator for the Psion 5mx! I found it while browsing through the last issue of LinuxFormat in the newsstand. Thought it was pretty damned cool, however insane it may be.

      Unfortunately, I completely forgot the name and web site for this puppy. I'll google it.

    • Re:S390 (Score:2)

      by AJWM ( 19027 )
      now all you need is the OS

      IBM placed the original OS/360 into the public domain a while back. You can get a CD image of it from http://www.cyberdynesys.com/os360.tgz [cyberdynesys.com] or ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/linux/hercos360/os360.tar.g z [ox.ac.uk]

      It's a bit of work to install (the process is reasonably well documented online, but it probably helps if you've had actual hands-on experience operating an S/360), but it works. And there are goodies like compilers for COBOL, FORTRAN, ALGOL and PL/I thrown in, just to round out that retro experience. (My dual 550 MHz P-III emulates a 370/158 faster than the original hardware, as far as CPU goes. Probably slower on I/O).
    • Yeah, but where's the smell of warm machine oil and paper dust from the cardpunch and the rattle of overworked DASD as some asshole thrashes the database...

      ///Peter "bury me face down, '9' edge first"

  • Bob Supnik rocks! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jarkko ( 40871 )
    I like Mr. Supniks emulators a lot. Even though
    they lack visually to a real PDP-11 or a VAX
    I like to use the simulators instead of the
    real hardware. Call me a heretic but I'd rather
    save on my electricity bill and I do take my
    older systems out on a test drive once in a while.

    OTOH, I'd love to get a real HP 2100 instead of an emulator :)

    Oh yeah, you can boot NetBSD on the VAX simulator, dmesg
    here. [netbsd.org].

  • Cool! (Score:1)

    by Choron ( 88276 )
    After looking at some of the system pictures on their page, like that one [trailing-edge.com], you can feel lucky you were not working in the IT field 30 years ago.
    • Come on, you haven't lived until you've toggled in binary to bootstrap a PDP-11!
      • Actually that wasn't that hard, because the PDP-11 had a ROM sequence you could toggle the address of. Compare that with the PDP-8, where you did have to toggle in the whole boot loader (at least enough code to read a binary image from the card or paper tape reader).

    • Re:Cool! (Score:1)

      by bjb ( 3050 )
      After looking at some of the system pictures on their page, like that one [trailing-edge.com], you can feel lucky you were not working in the IT field 30 years ago.


      Heck, I wouldn't mind all those buttons. What I'm MORE afraid about is the fact that most modern PCs ship with Windows these days, and many of them don't include reset buttons anymore!

  • Computer emulation in general is fascinating, not only for running PSX games, but for being able to run important packages that you simply can't reverse engineer on very old hardware.
    Other efforts are MESS (built on top of MAME, and oriened towards micros like Apple 2, C64 and *many* more).
    It would be great to have a *single* effort, eventually using MESS/MAME (that already have a large set of CPUs and I/O implemented), and merging in all the others.
  • It may not be significant, but its definitely historical. ;)
    It's just as important to remember the mistakes as the past as it is to remember the successes, lest we be doomed to repeat them.
  • I hadn't seen a PDP-11 in YEARS!

    In some respects a worthwhile projects. In many others, tits on a bull. But still...

    Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

  • 1, 2, ternary computer simulations also ? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Gis_Sat_Hack ( 101484 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @04:27AM (#3321939) Homepage

    "It is known that the ternary arithmetic has essential advantages as compared with the binary one that is used in present-day computers."

    Knuth himself predicted the flip-flop being one day replaced by the flip-flap-flop.

    I'd like to see this project tackle the simulation of the Setun series of Russian ternary computers.

  • one thing to try (Score:4, Funny)

    by CoughDropAddict ( 40792 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @04:30AM (#3321947) Homepage
    An interesting thing you could do with a PDP-11 emulator is try out one of the winning entries from the 1984 IOCCC that requires a PDP-11 to run [ioccc.org]. Look at the entry and you'll see why. :-)

    • My first machine was a PDP-11/40. All those twinkling lights. Just loved it! What a pleasure to program in assembler! What a shame I can't find the original OS (DOS/BATCH) for it.

      Join us at the PUPS [tuhs.org] to save this beautiful little machines from extinction!

  • I learned to program on a Pr1me [malch.com] system at Brooklands College, Weybridge and Farnborough College of Technology, Hants. Great bit of kit.
    • I hear you! I spent 4 years programming on a Pr1me. I loved doing Fortran on PrimOS. And how cool was COMO? Although, they never did produce a decent fullscreen editor. GET$....those were the days...
      • I spend a few more than four years on Primes. I liked them a lot at the time.

        Their dynamic linking and EPF format has yet to be surpassed by any other OS that I've seen. It makes Windows DLL hell all the worse by comparison.

        But the Single thread per user login got old after a while, and Phantoms didn't really make up for it.

        A fellow at our college wrote a full screen editor that became quite good, including word processing capabilities.

    • Testify, brother! My college (Cork Institute of Technology, Ireland, or as it weas known then, the Regional Technical College) used a Prime 750 when I was there (1986 - 1988). I had forgotten all about Phantoms, COMO, etc. Good times.
    • Hi!
      How refreshing to read all this!
      I used to work for PR1ME from 1977-88 as a sw-engineer in germany. we had lots of contacts to the primers in boston, of course, and DID we had fun among us and with the machines (most of the time)!!
      all that you remember, from como to phantoms and epf, are features i miss most of the time now. when i started, it was with rev5, on a p300, with 64K words memory (supporting 2 editors and 1 fortran compile). oh yeah. well, it wasn't all honey, we often (?) asked for sw which "them in Boston" didn't provide us. but we got a lot, from codasyl DB to cobol/forms, even Modula, common lisp and prolog. but the prizes and costs didn't come out good in the end, as our special OS (remember hardware for context switching support with lots of 32bit registersets?) needed special hw. this was what all was about: software first!
    • Primos may not be on the list yet, but after the CDC 6000 Series emulators are running, I'll be turning my attention to the Prime 400 (which was the beginning of the V-Mode architecture).

      But for now, I'm happy running a real Prime.

      Oh, and BTW, the 'Pr1me' thing was a midlife marketing crisis for Prime... early stuff didn't feel the need to use the '1'. OTOH, you can see I still use a Pr1me keyfob over on the right side of the pic at: http://members.iglou.com/dougq/cdc/smalltape.jpg

      Regards,
      -dq

  • No fun without the OS (copyrighted) and elusive (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 11, 2002 @04:36AM (#3321957)
    No fun without the OS (copyrighted) and elusive.

    For example I was one of the few people who privately negotiated to have the rights to access and modify any line of code in the Prime Operating System (PrimOS).

    I hacked a lot and fixed things years before Prime did. Increasing Tape Drive block size limits, buffers, adding zmodem xfers, all sorts of things.

    The compilers were superb. Awesome actually. I had all of them and bought many more.

    I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying cool tools for the Prime mainframe (technically a minicomputer that was maxed out into a mainframe).

    I had spreadsheets that even ran lotus-123.

    Prime (PrimOS) was better than UNIX in thousands of ways.

    I really miss the Prime.

    But I cannot ever give out my binary or source copies, they are copyrighted by Prime and I know (suspect) the tape gens were serialized to me.

    Plus its wrong.

    If Prime were to release the entire source distribution of just hteir complete OS and tools, the world would be a happier place and lots of nifty things could be done with it.

    What good is an emulator when the whole point of the Prime was to be untied to hardware.

    Microcode was loaded from a special boot floppy into a very fast ECL circuitboard that used the microcode to simulate the legacy instructions.

    But if you simulated a prime what would you simulate... equipment from 1977?, 1980?, 1985?, 1990?, 1994? They are all so similar when you get right to it.

    Nahhh.... what you REALLY need is the source or binaries to the OS and tools.

    MESS (like mame but for cmputer consoles not coinops) ships bios seperately from MESS because its a copyright violation to sell thos bioses.

    They are easy to get on usenet.

    But gigantic tape dumps of primos, or dec vax, or univac etc will never be common on irc or usenet.

    hell its all worthless.

    I admire the people that write the emulators.

    I really do.

    BUt Copyright restrictions that used to be 14 years in US, then eventually 75, and now (because of Disney Corp) up to 85 years are going to make it IMPOSSIBLE to ever enjoy emulators until 85 years from now.

    I will try to hold onto my Prime tapes until 2080 for that moment.

    Too bad no one will be alive that cares about the prime.

    Fair use my ass. I just want to non-profit play with a prime.

    • > what you REALLY need is the source or binaries to the OS and tools

      They are available (many of them, at least). Look at the web page.

      I ran three versions of UNIX and RSTS on the PDP-11 emulator.
    • Fair use my ass. I just want to non-profit play with a prime.

      Have you ever tried asking the people who own the Prime copyright to release it into the public domain, or at least let you use it for non-profit purposes? It's worked in other cases, and it's not really fair to complain about copyright stopping you until you've at least made an attempt to ask the copyright owner.
    • > For example I was one of the few people who privately negotiated to have the rights to
      > access and modify any line of code in the Prime operating System (PrimOS).

      Was this in the 80s? In the 70s, everybody got the source code...

      > But I cannot ever give out my binary or source copies, they are copyrighted by Prime and I
      > know (suspect) the tape gens were serialized to me.

      Yes, Primos was serialized, beginning with either Rev21 or Rev22. But I've never seen anyone state
      that using an unmatched system & OS would fail to work. I always assumed Primos was nagware.
      I guess I'll try this tonight when I get home.

      > Plus its wrong. REPLY: Seriously, please explain this.

      > If Prime were to release the entire source distribution of just hteir complete OS and
      > tools, the world would be a happier place and lots of nifty things could be done with it.

      Prime doesn't exist anymore. And based on my research, I believe Primos is abandoned property.

      > What good is an emulator when the whole point of the Prime was to be untied to hardware.

      Oh, please explain!

      > Microcode was loaded from a special boot floppy into a very fast ECL circuitboard that used the
      > microcode to simulate the legacy instructions.

      True of some systems; mine loads from ROMs.

      > But if you simulated a prime what would you simulate... equipment from 1977?, 1980?, 1985?,
      > 1990?, 1994? They are all so similar when you get right to it.

      200 & 100 are one family; 300 is 200/100 plus paging; 400 is 300 plus segmentation.
      450 begins the 50-series; 550-II begins I-mode. That's it. Choose one of the five.

      > Nahhh.... what you REALLY need is the source or binaries to the OS and tools.

      Which still exist...

      > MESS (like mame but for cmputer consoles not coinops) ships bios seperately from MESS
      > because its a copyright violation to sell thos bioses.

      That's because there really is someone who can prove they own those copyrights. (Cost of proving
      ownership of Primos > $PRIMOS_VALUE) AND (Cost of proving Primos ownership > recoverable $)

      > But gigantic tape dumps of primos, or dec vax, or univac etc will never be common on irc or
      > usenet.

      Five megabytes ain't that large...

      > hell its all worthless. REPLY: An opinion if ever I read one...

      > BUt Copyright restrictions that used to be 14 years in US, then eventually 75, and now
      > (because of Disney Corp) up to 85 years are going to make it IMPOSSIBLE to ever enjoy
      > emulators until 85 years from now.

      Crambe repitita...

      > I will try to hold onto my Prime tapes until 2080 for that moment.

      !!!!!!!!!!!!!

      > Fair use my ass. I just want to non-profit play with a prime.

      Well, once I can afford an LHC300, I'll hang mine on the net for people to
      hack into^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hplay with from time to time.

      But say, why not right your own emulator?

      Regards,
      OldPr1mate

  • Not an OS/390 emulator (Score:4, Informative)

    by Florian Weimer ( 88405 ) <fw@deneb.enyo.de> on Thursday April 11, 2002 @04:37AM (#3321961) Homepage
    Hercules is an S/370 etc. emulator, it does not emulate OS itself. It's complicate to run recent OS versions on Hercules for legal reasons, the operating system is usually licensed to particular machines.

    • The Scoop on Hercules (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      1) Hercules emulates both S/370 and S/390 hardware.

      2) As far as I know, the only modern operating system you are legally allowed to use on the S/390 version is Linux except potentially as part of your disaster recovery plans.

      3) But VM/370, MVS 3.2, etc. are in the public domain. So you can run them using Hercules as a S/370.

      4) MVS begat MVS/ESA begat OS/390 begat z/OS. From a user perspective, not all that much has changed! You still get the same cushy layer of JCL in the old versions of MVS. Fans of VM get to use the same virtual punch card reader in VM/370 as z/VM.
    • Hercules is indeed an ibm s370/s390/z900 emulator and can run ibm operating systems over 25 years old or ibm operating systems distributed today. See http://www.conmicro.cx/hercules There are freely available old os'es available (mvs 3.8j, dos r34) and newer ones (linux/390 & zLinux (which is 64-bit)). Current day proprietaryos'es are difficult at best, and you must have privileges (and knowledge) to get it working (eg os/390, z/os, z/vm).

  • Non-US systems ignored... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by earthy ( 11491 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @04:39AM (#3321965)
    How very interesting to note once again that Americans tend to think that everything important in computers has been American. For instance, I don't see the Electrologica machines, the X1 and X8, mentioned anywhere, even though they were the first to incorporate interrupts. Oh well. :)

    Oh, some more information is at the University of Amsterdam's Computer Museum's Electrologica X1 and X8 site [science.uva.nl].
    • Yeah, and what about the LEO?
      The Lyons Electronic Office was the world's first business computer, and it was British through and through.
      See here [lse.ac.uk] and here [leo-computers.org.uk] to learn more about the first ever business application of computing. The foresight shown by Lyons executives in the late 1940s put them way ahead of everyone in the world, and this from a company best known at the time for their teashops.
    • Instead of being accusatory, how about being constructive? If you feel some important machines have been left out, join in and help. Accusations are great for revving up emotions, but if you really want an international perspective then accusations and slurs are hardly the way to go.
    • Right. Like people outside the USA actually contibuted anything to computing.

      Next you'll tell me that some guy from Finland wrote his own OS...

      ...Oh wait!
    • I don't think that anyone ignores non-American things on the basis that they aren't American. Someone has already mentioned in this thread that the operating system that most of us go to the bat for is Linux, which we all acknowledge not only to be a Finnish effort, but a *world* effort. Just because an American fails to mention something non-American, doesn't mean that he or she is trying to be pro-American. It's probably that they forgot. Slashdot has seen too much of this 'American-Centric' versus 'Non-American-Centric' debate, when I feel that no one is trying to be American-centric on purpose. Perhaps it's just a misunderstanding? Though many of us live in the U.S. and discuss the U.S., doesn't make us American bigots.

      One of your biggest problems in this particular story is that it is talking about legacy technology. And since most of Slashdot's readers happen to live in the U.S., most are going to know about the hardware that was readily available in the U.S. at the various schools and companies. Thus, the most discussed hardware is going to follow this trend. The appropriate approach for mentioning the X1 and X8 would have simply been: "You forgot {..}"
    • Actually, what you call an American bias here is more of a Digital Equipment bias. The main author, Robert Supnik, was once a VP at DEC, and has used his connections to get enough stuff made available to make the emulators useful (like operating systems, languages, etc). If you want to see more non-US emulators included, get busy and write them. The documentation, software, and user experience is going to be much easier for you to find, being in the country they were built in, than they would be to an American. Robert already has enough work on the emulators he is developing right now to keep him busy for a long time.

  • Real-time Multics (Score:5, Funny)

    by delphi125 ( 544730 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @04:51AM (#3321976)
    Reminds me of a comment made in a lecture by Roger Needham a dozen years ago:

    Multics was an operating system designed for the real-time simulation of geological processes.

    It took us a while for it to sink in before we worked it out.

  • or perhaps my friendly Pet 2000 or my Commodore 64! Those were the days - when you could actually know *everything* about a computer. Ahh, I loved having a BASIC interpreter as the OS/"shell".

  • Virtutech (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Virtutech's simulator Simic was used by e.g. Suse for porting Linux to AMD's upcoming x86-64 (Hammer project). You can read more in a twelve page article available at Simic's homepage. http://www.simics.net/simics/simics-computer-febru ary-2002-w-cover.pdf

    Apparently it simulates a great number of hardware as seen from the benchmarks given in the article:

    Table 1. Simics performance of target systems for a variety of operatingsystem boot workloads.
    Target Boot workload Instructions Time (sec) MIPS
    Alpha-ev5 Tru64 2,112,119,247 354 5.9
    Alpha-ev5 Linux 1,201,600,120 164 7.3
    Sparc-u2 Solaris 81 1,597,537,438 284 5.6
    Sparc-u3 Solaris 81 6,155,835,717 987 6.2
    x86-p2 Linux2 1,299,639,608 227 5.7
    x86-p2 Windows XP 3,129,351,000 1,518 2.1
    x86-64 Linux2 1,299,639,608 285 4.5
    Itanium Linux 4,644,372,142 1,470 3.2
    PPC-750 VxWorks 1,179,516,468 136 8.7
    PPC-750 Linux3 498,836,969 53 9.3
  • But will i be able to play the TRS-80 games that i found in the attic last week. The monitor on that great system from radio shack broke 2 years ago. I could write basic when i was six on that machine.
  • /me pats his trusty 386 running potato :)

    Its not emulated either, its a natural :)

  • Yeah, simh is great (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @06:17AM (#3322124) Homepage
    if your into that sort of thing. Having cut my teeth on a real Altair/BASIC (haha) I enjoyed getting the Z80 emulator running (on linux), mounting a floppy disk (which I never could afford then) and running old Startrek type games. Then just last Jan. got into getting the ORIGINAL Colassal Cave adventure [rickadams.org] in genuine FORTRAN running on the PDP10 emulator running TOPS10. Guess who provides a prebuilt TOPS10 bootable system disk? Paul Allen [paulallen.com]. The hardest part was figuring out how DEC handled tape mounting, and finding a utility to convert files into a tape format to get them 'into' the emulator. Not only that, but once you have the PDP10 running, you can attach the terminal server to a port and have time share terminals accessable over the network, thru firewalls, etc. It was a great insight into how medium size businesses and a great many college campus computer centers were run in the late 60's to mid 70's. You can boot up Unix v5, 6, 7 - I could only get v5 running but there's a nifty chess game in /usr/games/ ;)

  • Nostalgia (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nekosej ( 302666 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @06:18AM (#3322127)
    Somehow the bygone days are not the same without the real sensory experiences: -The high pitched beep and generated key-click of a VT-100. -The teflon-like smooth scroll of said VT-100 -The flashing lights on a 300 baud modem. -The spastic cursor advancing at the speed of above modem. -The Pepto-Bismol pink of paper tape. -The rat-tat-tat of a line printer. -ASCII charts tacked on the wall next to a Heather Thomas and/or Locklear poster -The B.O. and discarded pizza crusts of those around you. (I guess they'll never go away). -8 inch Floppies that actually flopped. -And for the tactile minded: The mushy pop of the Timex Sinclair keyboard, as opposed to the mushy... mush of DEC terminals. Oh how I missing folding, spindling and mutilating...
    • What do you mean gone? Many companies still use that hardware. In many cases it's at the request of the client who has remote locations that have updated their hardware since the punch card system was new and need that backward capability.

      One year ago I worked in a place that had tape drives the size of washing machines, tape reels that store 137bytes per foot, a vt-100 terminal that interfaces with an ibm s/390 and a dot-matrix printer to print up job requests....that was a year ago and they are still running it that way to this day.
    • Oh yeah! And don't forget the sheer joy of running a multipart bursting machine at full tilt. This felt especially dangerous when you had a 3-foot stack of 5-part fanfold to burst and separate. Never could figure out how to get the carbon off the roller without getting my hands blackened. *sigh*
    • With modern graphics and 3D sound processing, I'll bet it wouldn't be too hard to add at least some of the sensory experience. The sounds would be easiest- imagine a 3D sound setup where the printer sounds like it's over in one corner, and every time you click a key, an old-fashioned loud key click comes from the location of your keyboard..
      The smell of the pizza crusts and the actual feel of the keyboard would of course still have to be left to the imagination.
      • With modern graphics and 3D sound processing, I'll bet it wouldn't be too hard to add at least some of the sensory experience.
        How to get the floor to "thrum" as the disk pack spins up, that cold dry flavorless air inside the machine room, the detritus of paper lint & chads in the corners, and the perfume of an outgassing VT-100 mixing with some visitor's day-old "Jovan Musk" cologne...

        Or in my case the ubiquitious CCC "Grape Cake". Take a day-old pound cake bought at the Star Merket in Central Square, get a bottle of Grape Jelly, slice said pound cake in half and apply as much grape jelly as won't run out. For the ambitious the cake can be sliced into several layers. Share with a room full of hungry geeks at 4am and enjoy the always slightly-tacky keyboard afterwards...

        Some things just can't be simulated.

    • Doesn't sound so ancient... How about the kerchunking of the 029 Keypunch? The roar of the output card punch on the old 635. The clank of the mechanism on the Teletype model 15? The whoshing of 28 tape drives doing a big sort? The ice cold air freezing your feet in the 100db noisy raised floor machine room? The 8 foot thick assembly listings of the operating system?

      The clicking of switches on the 1620 control panel? The soft wobble of output scopes on an analog computer? The paper-tape rolls on the floor of the Maniac room, lit up by the tube filaments?

      The paper fountain of a 7094 when you put the wrong skip code in column one of your Fortan output...
    • does anyone have a better piece of code for a spastic {colon|cursor|whatever} than this routine which is the best i have been able to hack together on my own?

      yes i know it is clunky, and really dependent on my machine, since i didn't post the dynamic cursor, which changes based on system speed, but it's CowboyNeal's fault, or CmdrTaco, or somebody, 'cos they got a lousy lame filter which prevents me from posting my really fun code.

      anyways. looking for a better spastic {colon|cursor|whatever}, and this is the place to find such an item (aside from possibly ebay)

      void spastic(long m)
      {
      int i;
      for (i=0;im;i++)
      {
      cout"\\\b|\b/\b-\b";
      }
      }

      did i mention the lame filter sucks?

  • Geek Romance (Score:4, Funny)

    by mikosullivan ( 320993 ) <miko&idocs,com> on Thursday April 11, 2002 @06:23AM (#3322138)
    A married couple I know met when they were in the card stack line for the university mainframe. How do you suppose the the historical society could emulate that?

  • Manchester Mark 1 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by d5w ( 513456 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @06:38AM (#3322165)
    Reading about this reminded me of the Manchester Mark 1 programming contest [slashdot.org] in 1998, to find the most interesting program that could be run on the world's first stored-program computer; the winner getting to run the program on the recently-revived hardware. For any hackers who missed it at the time, it's worth looking at the details [man.ac.uk] of the machine: 32 32-bit words which were simultaneously instructions and data.

    When the contest came around I played with it for a while, then something took over my time and I never got to check on the results [man.ac.uk] until reminded by this story. For those who don't feel like clicking through all the links, there were some nice mathematical runners up, but the winner was an unusually interesting instant noodle timer.

  • Already these big companies are ready to sue at the drop of a hat. they want money at any exense, wont there be copyright and patent issues involve, though the historical servers may not be of any practical use now, the DMCA supporters will just try to create problems for the heck of it, correct me if i am wrong
  • While we are on wish emulaters.

    I wish I had a CDC Cyber 1700 emulater with the Cyber 1820 extensions just like I use to use in 1978 (remember the Beegees and "Staying Alive"?).

    I'd also love a monochrome terminal with red phosphors like I had then. You don't see those now. Some of the CRTs actually drew on the screen and they looked awesome but they were limited and the raster CRTs have taken over everywhere.

    We used to waste hours playing Lunar Lander (we wrote it of course, no graphics (I hadn't even heard the word then), just numbers and it was still fun).

    We've come a long way since I started 24 years ago.
    • If you have any CDC 1700 or Cyber 17 msterials that could be used for developing an emulator,
      I know someone who is collecting said materials for precisely that purpose, and I can direct you
      to him.

      Regards,
      -OldPr1mate

  • SIMH review on NewsForge (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This review was over on NewsForge just last month:

    http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/03/01/17362 43 [newsforge.com]

  • Beh (Score:3, Insightful)

    by enneff ( 135842 ) on Thursday April 11, 2002 @07:27AM (#3322276) Homepage
    The thing about nostalgia is that you can pine for something that is long gone, but as soon as you get it back you suddenly wonder why you wanted it back in the first place.

    This applies especially to computing, where I often find myself in an environment from yesteryear only to hear myself say "wow, this really sucked!"

  • ENIAC-on-a-Chip (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mikosullivan ( 320993 ) <miko&idocs,com> on Thursday April 11, 2002 @07:38AM (#3322298)
    They might also want to mention the ENIAC-on-a-Chip [upenn.edu] project.
    • I was one of the folks who did that. I don't think they ever got funding to put together the support system to make it run, though. Programming the original ENIAC entailed plugging in cables and turning dials, so we did our best to make the chip capable of doing that. However, it would've needed a little bit of hardware to connect to a computer, and then a software system to load in all the settings. There was another project a little bit earlier that did a software simulator, and we were going to use their GUI. But we all graduated, the 50th anniverary passed, so I doubt anyone carried it all the way through to completion. So we built the chip, but I have no way of knowing whether or not it actually works.
  • I can see the day when there's a Windows XP emulator. Future hackers will be fascinated at the way the module reaches into their bank accounts and drains out money.
  • Interesting stuff, but very US orientated. There's a group in the UK doing similar stuff: The British Computer Society's Computer Preversavation Society [129.11.152.25].

    They're mostly looking at rebuilding, restoring and/or simulating systems from very early on in the development of computers as we now know it. Also activities is preserving some of the earliest software, such as the first true stored program to be run.

    Maybe these two groups should get together.
  • I'd like to see an emulator for that (or similar "classic" Burroughs Large Systems). 48-bit word, tagged words, HLL stack architecture, etc.

    Apparently Unisys does actually have an emulator for the B6700's successor "A-series" machines, but it's proprietary (and maybe for internal use only).
    • Apparently Unisys does actually have an emulator for the B6700's successor "A-series" machines, but it's proprietary (and maybe for internal use only).
      It's not for internal use only. If you buy a new A-series machine, what you get is a box that runs the simulator.
      • The ASIC is version still alive and well. The emulator is quite nice because you can essentially tug a low-end A-Series around on your laptop. They do sell the emulated version on the ES7000 hardware, as well.
  • Some guys are working on a portable software emulator of the TI Explorer II Lisp machine.
    An LVM anyone?

    http://www.unlambda.com/lispm/

    Give in to deliciousness!

  • I made a wallet-sized PDP-11 (see photo) [graflex.org] using these tools.

    I put the simh PDP-11 [trailing-edge.com] emulator and unix_v7_rl.dsk [trailing-edge.com] along with the following script onto a CF card formatted as a DOS FAT partition.

    set cpu 18b
    set rl0 RL02
    att rl0 unix_v7_rl.dsk
    boot rl0
    #boot
    #rl(0,0)rl2unix

    You have to type those last two lines manually to the PDP-11's boot prompt.

    I'm ready to roll with a PDP-11 in my wallet (or, if you include the $9.95 CF-USB (Linux driver) [geocrawler.com] card, in my Penguin Mints [thinkgeek.com] container, which matches the black and yellow 48MB Lexar card I got on sale at Fry's for $19.95).

    Total cost for a PDP-11 running Unix: $29.90, mints not included.

    BTW, the default V7 "root" password is "root" (I ran John the Ripper [openwall.com] and it took 0.00002 seconds).

    • Er... you've created a mini-disk pack. When you said that you had a PDP in your wallet I was sort of expecting a PalmPilot or an EspressoPC.

      Still, if you think about it... NetBSD on a PowerBook Duo (or equivalent tiny laptop) running this, you'd have a portable PDP-11. That would be pretty cool, IMHO.

      /Brian

      • As René Magritte alluded in "The Betrayal of Images," emulations blur the boundaries between hardware and software.

        • My box is a PDP-11 because all it needs to operate is a co-processor that provides power and I/O (display and keyboard) via the ubiquitous 4-pin USB connector.
        • My PDP-11 will boot and keep its state in its file system and run the same on any Mac, Windows PC or Linux PC.
        • My PDP-11 is similar to those who claim that their TRS-80 or PIC is a web server -- the near ubiquity of other computers with RS232 on one siade and connectivity to the Internet on the other is what makes those feats possible.
        • My PDP-11 just requires a little more of its co-processor, but requiring a co-processor for operation is not new (DEC's PDP-10 systems usually had a PDP-11 front-end providing keyboard and display functions).
        Given that simh will run on just about any modern computer with a USB port, in some deep sense my PDP-11 is in fact not dependent on the co-processor for its identity or functionality.

        And yes, there is a disk pack there, but it's inside the PDP-11. And there's even a RL driver for it, written in 11 code.

  • Dude, you're getting a DEC.

    /Brian
  • We have a pair of S/390 here [uconn.edu] that will run OS/390 as a guest OS under VM/CMS.

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