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Cray X-MP Simulator Resurrects Piece of Computer History

Posted by timothy on from the just-plain-cray-zee-ness! dept.

An anonymous reader writes "If you have a fascination with old supercomputers, like I do, this project might tickle your interest: A functional simulation of a Cray X-MP supercomputer, which can boot to its old batch operating system, called COS. It's complete with hard drive and tape simulation (no punch card readers, sorry) and consoles. Source code and binaries are available. You can also read about the journey that got me there, like recovering the OS image from a 30 year old hard drive or reverse-engineering CRAY machine code to understand undocumented tape drive operation and disk file-systems."

3 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. Also IBM 360 and TI 990 emulators by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    There are a bunch of other old computer emulators around such as the IBM 360/370/380/390 http://www.hercules-390.eu/ on which you can run OS\360, MVS and some other IBM OSes http://www.ibiblio.org/jmaynard/

    Also the TI990 minicomputer with the DX10 OS here http://www.cozx.com/~dpitts/ti990.html

    It is great that people are preserving these things so that programmers of the future will have a chance to experience how things were in the early days. When you see the limitations that programmers had to work with, it is more understandable why they did things the way that they did.

    1. Re:Also IBM 360 and TI 990 emulators by mendax · · Score: 3, Informative

      A favorite is an emulation of another of Seymour Cray's earlier designs, the Control Data 6000 series monsters from 1964 and its successors the Cybers, complete with screen shots of its then innovative console. I'd love to have this running on my iMac. I still have a copy of the old MIT Adventure game in FORTRAN for these beasts from my college days I wish I could play again. I'm too lazy to try to port it over to something else or get it to compile in a more modern FORTRAN compiler. However, the emulator does not include a copy of the NOS 2 dead start tape.

      --
      It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
  2. Re: can I run it on my cellphone? by EGSonikku · · Score: 4, Informative

    Considering the original Cray XMP ran at 105MHz and had 16MB RAM, yes. But in 1982, those specs were just wildly insane.

    --
    - "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"