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Don't Nurse Old Hardware - Emulate It

Posted by timothy on from the stand-ins dept.

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?"

4 of 403 comments (clear)

  1. Emulation is great .. by z0ink · · Score: 5, Insightful

    .. but you forget the reason people dont upgrade is that it costs money to do so.

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  2. Good idea... but... by AdeBaumann · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Before I even R'd TFA, I thought about one big problem:

    How are you going to emulate a 5.25 inch drive to read old disks?

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  3. The Stability of New Products vs Old by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Although this is a very good idea I question the stability of a new emulator vs an old proven system.

    By using the original the kinks have already been worked out, quirks are known and understood, and everything just works.

    By creating an emulator you have bugs to smash, that's just the way software is. Also keep in mind this seems to apply to big businesses (financial, medical) and large organizations (NASA) with legacy hardware. Since the stability of these systems is absolutely crucial why would they want to switch to a new, unproven, buggy system that stick with the old?

  4. I wonder why... by 5m477m4n · · Score: 5, Insightful

    by Bob Supnik, Sun Microsystems

    Gee, I wonder why he would be recommending buying new servers?

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