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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..."
There already is a S/390 emulator... now all you need is the OS... or you could be daring and try Linux on it.
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.
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); }