Emulators of Classic Computers

From: Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com>
Date: Thu Jan 15 15:18:44 2004

But entire paradigms disappear, not just hardware. I disagree that
today's software will be runnable at all 'in the future', the vefry
concept of what a program is will likely change or even disappear.

Take a look at how computable problems were approached in 1953 vs.
today. Granted, there's the new-system-startup and massive quick
orientation into the source-compile-load-run-interact model we are just
now exiting (via networking, virtual machinery, autonomous software,
etc), and running Pong on a peecee will be as easy and amusing as
breaking off tabs in answerbacks and patching papertape.

tomj

PS: I worked, in 1980, for 6 months + 1 day, at the horrible Avco
Everett Research Lab in Mass (my one and only defense job, shades of
GILES GOATBOY). I did my 8x300 cross-compilations on an IBM 360 running
(gulp) TSO. In the room next door was a CDC 6600, card and printer
in/out, no "console". They had an IBM 1401 emulator under which payroll
ran, allegedly, running on it. TSO sucked. Imagine 20-minute kestroke
response ("SEND") right before lunch as normal behavior.




On Wed, 2004-01-14 at 18:40, Jerome H. Fine wrote:
> >Tom Uban wrote:
>
> > To further this depressing story, even if you were to save a room full of
> > old computers to run the actual software on, in time they would break down
> > and the integrated circuits inside would be no longer available for repair,
> > assuming that you were able to secure copies of the proprietary hardware
> > manuals that would be needed to maintain the systems...
>
> Jerome Fine replies:
>
> I suggest that the intent was to be able to use
> current hardware with the old software - at
> some time in the future.
>
> The difficulty is that so little information was
> made available that no estimate is possible.
>
> As for the suggestions I have seen in respect
> of using an emulator, I think that even one
> example is sufficient. I currently use Ersatz-11
> to run software that is more than a decade old.
>
> The range is from the early 1970s to the early
> 1990s. While the former is unusual, just this
> week I tested some software in response to
> a question on this list. The release date of
> the operating system was November 20th, 1975.
> The hardware I am using is a 750 MHz Pentium III
> with 768 MBytes of memory and 3 * 40 GByte
> EIDE ATA 100 hard disk drives. In 1975,
> that operating system would have been running
> on a CPU with a speed of between 0.1 and
> 0.5 MHz and the memory would have likely
> been around 16 KBytes with 2.5 MByte
> removable hard disk drives. Yet 29 years
> later, it can still be run and I fully hope that
> it will still be possible in another 29 years.
>
> As one example of a much more versatile
> emulator, SIMH handles up to a dozen
> different hardware systems.
>
> I realize that probably over 95% of this list
> is more inclined to hardware and likes to hear
> the fans and see the lights blink, but eventually
> in 200 years, that hardware will no longer
> exist. BUT, I fully expect that the software
> will still run in some form even if multiple
> emulators are required. There is just far
> too much software out there that will still
> be running even if just a small fraction of the
> people use emulators.
>
> Sincerely yours,
>
> Jerome Fine
> --
> If you attempted to send a reply and the original e-mail
> address has been discontinued due a high volume of junk
> e-mail, then the semi-permanent e-mail address can be
> obtained by replacing the four characters preceding the
> 'at' with the four digits of the current year.
Received on Thu Jan 15 2004 - 15:18:44 GMT