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Don't Nurse Old Hardware - Emulate It
gManZboy writes "Bob Supnik, former team lead for DEC's VAX microprossesor, has an article up on Queue about his Computer History Simulation Project and how emulating old servers may be a better way to keep them running that servicing the physical machines. So how many PDP-11's can you run on a Pentium 4 anyhow?"
I seem to remember they said they originally started out with an 11/44 in the early to mid seventies, and then upgraded along the way. That would mean a fairly large transition from a hex to quad backplane system (I think sometime in the late '80s), but the software should have continued running just fine. The system boots RT-11, and which then starts their control application. It was originally purchased as part of a package from a tools manufacturing company, which is either long out of business or at least not supporting that old stuff any longer. The owner is a friend and I occassionally go in to take a look at the box, then we toss some beers. There's rarely anything to do, the damn thing is a tank. It wouldn't surprise me one bit to see the government still relying on old PDP-11s and VAX-11s for critical real-time applications. These systems just don't die. Why risk change when something important still works? --M