Cray X-MP Simulator Resurrects Piece of Computer History

Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 26, 2013 @04:35AM 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."

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This would have been a whole lot easier by Anonymous Coward · 2013-06-26 04:56 · Score: 4, Interesting

if SGI wouldn't have deliberately destroyed all the old documentation and software when they bought Cray.
Sweet! by Nidi62 · 2013-06-26 06:13 · 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
Re: can I run it on my cellphone? by EGSonikku · 2013-06-26 06:36 · 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"