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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."

6 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. Anonymous? by Jmc23 · · Score: 3, Funny

    If you want to be anonymous, linking to your blog with your full name probably isn't the way to go!

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  2. This would have been a whole lot easier by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    if SGI wouldn't have deliberately destroyed all the old documentation and software when they bought Cray.

  3. can I run it on my cellphone? by peter303 · · Score: 3, Funny

    and would it be faster than the original?

    1. 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.

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      - "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
  4. Sweet! by Nidi62 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Now I can sequence that old dinosaur DNA I got from this chunk of amber sitting in my closet!

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    The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
  5. 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.

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