Retro Roundup: Old Computers Emulated Right In Your Browser

An anonymous reader writes: If you ever wanted to program an Altair, an Apple I, or a COSMAC ELF you may think you either have to buy one (expensive now) or load and configure simulation software. However, there's a slew of browser-based emulators for everything from a PDP-11 to Windows 1.0 out there. Some use Java, but many use Javascript and many perform better on a modern PC then they did in their original. If you want to learn some history or just want to finally play with the computers you saw in the magazines 35 years ago, these are great fun and slightly addictive.

Comments

Bunch of whiners in this discussion so far

[kheldan]

Also, people who apparently either don't have any sense of fun, or perhaps they're all millennials and poo-poo anything older than they are, or maybe both. For cryin' out loud, people, these emulators for (in some cases literally) antique hardware aren't intended for 'serious' use, or development, or anything like that: They're intended to be fun to play with, or maybe educational since most of them are emulating systems that either don't exist anymore or are so rare that you'll likely never even see one in the flesh. Yes, some of us are old enough that we actually owned (or built, as the case may be) some of these systems, but again: If you're complaining about them then I question whether you have any sense of what's fun or not. When some of these computers were available, screwing around with computers was still fun; they're not as much fun in many ways now, because it's all too much serious business, and too much of it is closed-source, proprietary, locks the user out, physically inaccessible, or in some extreme cases you get prosecuted or sued in civil court for getting caught messing with it. In many cases some of the hardware may as well be potted in a solid brick of opaque epoxy, for all the good it'll do you to try to get at the actual hardware. Building a complete computer system from component parts (i.e. requiring soldering)? So impractical now as to be nigh-unto impossible (I could do it, but there's no point anymore). The closest thing we have anymore is you younger guys screwing around with microcontrollers (many of which are more powerful than many of the computers being emulated here, ironically enough), but even then you have to have an entire modern computer just to write the simplest code for them, there's no 'front panel' where you can enter machine code directly, one byte at a time. Don't knock it 'till you try it, guys (and ladies).

Re:Bunch of whiners in this discussion so far

[Pseudonymous Powers]

Agreed, for the most part. Most of the posters seem to be angry because these emulators are browser-based, because apparently native or app-based emulators for forty-year-old game consoles whose killer app was a purple block that chases a cyan block are for real, legitimate, artistic visionaries, while browser-based versions are for dumb stupid babies.

This strikes me like a 45-year-old dude whose hobby is modelling 16th-century Spanish sailing ships in balsa-wood setting fire to the basement workshop of a 35-year old dude someone whose hobby is building 16th-century Portuguese sailing ships out of matchsticks after their parents naively set up a play-date for them.

Re:Lots of interesting comments at -1

[squiggleslash]

Well, 90% of them are off-topic, complaining about the wording, or just trolls about Java. I'm not entirely sure what nuanced discussion in the -1 realm you're referring to. I think the nearest I saw to a remotely reasonable modded down comment was a whine about how the poster felt the browser was not the right place for a computer emulator, which... didn't address even the reasons implied in TFS.

Me, I'm very glad people are building these things. Keeping older platforms alive isn't just nice for nostalgia reasons, it reminds us of the good things we're missing today and stops them from being forgotten.

Re:Lots of interesting comments at -1

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem, as I see it, is that by doing it in Javascript, we're introducing a new dependency: the code will only work on a browser produced in 2015. That's because Javascript, as implemented in a browser, is itself is a moving target. Go on, just try to browse the modern web in Mozilla 1.0. Or Firefox 3.6. You'll find half the Javascript-dependent sites of 2015 simply doesn't work on older browsers.

Is that strictly relevant? I think the dependency we're really introducing is: the code will only work on a browser produced in 2015 or later. If an emulator was originally built for Firefox 41, five years from now I won't care whether or not it runs in Firefox 1.0 as long as it still runs in Firefox 2020.

Correct. That's the point I was trying to make. I do not believe the JS of today will run in Firefox 2020. The language is still evolving. (Not as bad as Perl4/5/6 or Python2/3, but it's still fragmenting.) The assumption - possibly fallacious - is that because the JS of 2015 doesn't run in the browsers of 2010, the JS of 2010 probably doesn't run in the browsers of today, because things can be deprecated and removed from the standard as well as added to it. Does the BLINK tag work today? I'm glad it doesn't, but you get the point...

Code compiled for x86 has a better track record of backwards compatibility; the odds are much greater that a Win10 x64 binary will run on Windows 2020, and an ELF compiled today will be compatible with the ABI of Linux Anydistro 2020, than it is that anything written in the JS of today will run on Anybrowser 2020.

We're now dependent on two sets of developers: one set of crusty greybeards to can translate 8-bit schematics into code, and a second set of bushy blackbeards who can translate anything into Javascript. Advantage to the blackbeards for cross-platform compatibility, but I hope they're still around 20 years from now.