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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.
"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.
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