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..."
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 - try it! Little Green Desktop has applications to use
it's in my head
There already is a S/390 emulator... now all you need is the OS... or you could be daring and try Linux on it.
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..
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.
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.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
"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.
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. Look at the entry and you'll see why. :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
Miko O'Sullivan
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.
Oh yeh..... "their" should be "they're"
Tony
This applies especially to computing, where I often find myself in an environment from yesteryear only to hear myself say "wow, this really sucked!"
I'd grab the 360-series emulation in a New York minute if I could get Algol W and Algol 68C for it.
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.
Miko O'Sullivan
They might also want to mention the ENIAC-on-a-Chip project.
Miko O'Sullivan
Yes, yes you will! :-)
This is where I found an emulator that works very well: TRS-80 Emulator Web Site
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.
Miko O'Sullivan
The end result is the most important part. There's no bloody point spending hours writing code if that code isn't actually going to do anything, even if that thing is just flash your name in morse-code on the caps lock light!
"Information wants to be paid"
Hours of coding time spent just to make a emulator program that doesn't do anything usefull
I spend days of coding time just to make something which isn't usefull at all. And I think it was great time.
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...
CrazyLegs
"Pork!!" said the Fish, and we all laughed.
Yes, I would, and have written code for fun for machines I couldn't get at, then I wrote emulators for them, most of them unfinished. I never said that the final product is completely unimportant, it's another piece of the fun, that doesn't mean it has to do something useful, which is the point I was making.
The best coders are the ones who truly love every aspect of it, actually that goes for anything, the best are usually the ones who love the whole process, beginning to end, it doesn't matter what the end is.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
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.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
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).
-- Alastair
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).
-- Alastair
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.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Almost the point I was trying to make, with a different conclusion. The end part isn't the most important part in my opinion. The entire process is equally valuable. And my main point was that the end product doesn't have to be useful to be of value, as you have shown with your example.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
I made a wallet-sized PDP-11 (see photo) using these tools.
I put the simh PDP-11 emulator and unix_v7_rl.dsk along with the following script onto a CF card formatted as a DOS FAT partition.
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) card, in my Penguin Mints 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 and it took 0.00002 seconds).
Dude, you're getting a DEC.
/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.
If you don't have to clean the card-edge connectors daily, it ain't an accurate trash-80 simulation!
The only good weather is bad weather.