Slashdot Mirror
The Computer History Simulation Project
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..."
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 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.
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.
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 and here 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.
"Information wants to be paid"
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 in genuine FORTRAN running on the PDP10 emulator running TOPS10. Guess who provides a prebuilt TOPS10 bootable system disk? Paul Allen. 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/ ;)
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
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...
Never pet a burning dog.
Some of these old computers are still in use, but it is getting harder and harder to find spare parts when they break down.
One way to ensure longevity is to port the software, but this is not always easy. I am currently involved in a project to port a control system that runs on PDP11s to Microware's OS9. The code was all written in CORAL66, so we have to convert it to C first. For efficiecy reasons when the code was originally written, much of it is hard to understand, and there are global variables and horrible interdependencies between modules everywhere. Then there's all the hardware-dependent stuff to sort out. Altogether, it is a pretty big and ugly undertaking.
An alternative is to emulate a PDP11 on a modern machine. This is a twin stragegy (to porting) that we are also pursuing. So emulation is important, and projects like the Computer History Simulation Project are a good thing.
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 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.
They might also want to mention the ENIAC-on-a-Chip project.
Miko O'Sullivan