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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.
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).
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!