Use old computers today at Nostalgic Computing

Discussions
1

There are nearly 20 old machines over on Nostalgic Computing, ready for you to program, in a teletype-like experience in your browser. Each one comes with some potted demos to run programs in APL or ALGOL or other popular languages, but also offers a command line with full guest access.

Here’s APL on a Z80 running CP/M:

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image1199×705 202 KB

(The Z80 machine at least seems to be an emulation, but the PRIME allows one to submit a remote batch job to the CDC Cyber 865 - there’s some kind of network - so I’m really not sure what’s going on. The PDP 11 running BSD has been up for 66 days.)

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2

Tried a VMS machine… but I’ve forgotten too much. edit/tpu worked, but I couldn’t remember the keystrokes.

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3

Tried one of the Primes. Logged in. Remembered the “listf” command. Decided I didn’t want to remember any more. They don’t feature highly in my list of old computers I’m fond of…

-Gordon

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4

Amazing! It is really useful to share the user experience of these machines with the people that are curious about how the last century computers worked.

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5

Did the microVAX.

The first Unix machine I was ever root on was a microVAX 2, running Ultrix 32m, in about 1984. Most of the commands worked for me. There was a random a.out file in there, so I marked it executable and ran it – it seemed to hang, ctrl-C didn’t do anything, but ctrl-Z and then “kill -9” got it done. Some of the old muscle memory is still there (though, to be fair, this would work on modern Linux, too.)

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6

This site is fab!

I’ve been playing with 2.11BSD on the PDP-11. It’s fully network connected, and you can even ping google and some of the other machines.

I’m now about to try to setup 2.11BSD on an Altera DE1 FPGA board.

Dave

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7

Slightly off-topic, but PDP2011 is now running on my DE1:

Hello, world [t47]: cpu 11/06 fpu
177776           psw
177774           slr
177772           pirq
177770           mbr
177766           cer
177764           id
177762 - 177760  size
177752           mr
177750           mnt
177746 - 177740  mr
177676 - 177600  pdr/par
177576 - 177572  mmu
177570           sdr
177566 - 177560  kl
177546           kw
176776 - 176700  rh
174516 - 174510  xu
173776 - 173000  m9312
172516           mmu
172376 - 172300  pdr/par
172276 - 172200  pdr/par
170376 - 170200  ubm
165776 - 165000  m9312

boot from rp:

70Boot from xp(0,0,0) at 0176700
: 
: xp(0,0,0)unix
Boot: bootdev=05000 bootcsr=0176700

2.11 BSD UNIX #115: Sat Apr 22 19:07:25 PDT 2000
    [email protected]:/usr/src/sys/GENERIC


phys mem  = 3932160
avail mem = 3708224
user mem  = 307200

August 23 21:00:27 init: configure system

hk ? csr 177440 vector 210 skipped:  No CSR.
ht ? csr 172440 vector 224 skipped:  No CSR.
ra ? csr 172150 vector 154 skipped:  No CSR.
rl ? csr 174400 vector 160 skipped:  No CSR.
tm ? csr 172520 vector 224 skipped:  No CSR.
tms ? csr 174500 vector 260 skipped:  No CSR.
ts ? csr 172520 vector 224 skipped:  No CSR.
xp 0 csr 176700 vector 254 attached
erase, kill ^U, intr ^C
# Fast boot ... skipping disk checks
checking quotas: done.
Assuming non-networking system ...
checking for core dump... 
preserving editor files
clearing /tmp
standard daemons: update cron accounting.
starting lpd
starting local daemons: sendmail.
Wed Aug 23 21:00:56 PDT 2006
August 23 21:00:56 init: kernel security level changed from 0 to 1


2.11 BSD UNIX (curly.2bsd.com) (console)

login: dmb
Password:
Last login: Wed Aug 23 20:45:44 on console
2.11 BSD UNIX #115: Sat Apr 22 19:07:25 PDT 2000
$ cat spigot.c
#include <stdio.h>
#define N (400*14/4)
main() {
   short r[N + 1], i, k, b, c;
   long d;
   c = 0;
   for (i = 1; i <= N; i++)
      r[i] = 2000;
   for (k = N; k > 0; k -= 14) {
      d = 0;
      i = k;
      for(;;) {
         d += r[i]*10000L;
         b = i*2 - 1;
         r[i] = d%b;
         d /= b;
         i--;
         if (i == 0) break;
         d *= i;
      }
      printf("%04d", (int)(c + d/10000));
      c = d%10000;
   }
   printf("\n");
}
$ cc spigot.c -o spigot
$ time spigot | fold -40
3141592653589793238462643383279502884197
1693993751058209749445923078164062862089
9862803482534211706798214808651328230664
7093844609550582231725359408128481117450
2841027019385211055596446229489549303819
6442881097566593344612847564823378678316
5271201909145648566923460348610454326648
2133936072602491412737245870066063155881
7488152092096282925409171536436789259036
0011330530548820466521384146951941511609
$ fortune
Under the wide and heavy VAX
Dig my grave and let me relax
Long have I lived, and many my hacks
And I lay me down with a will.
These be the words that tell the way:
"Here he lies who piped 64K,
Brought down the machine for nearly a day,
And Rogue playing to an awful standstill."
$
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8

I’m especially impressed they are all networked together.

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9

I tried a VAX machine but I’ve forgotten too much. I used to work for DEC, knew EDIT/TPU but can’t remember all the gold keys and what they are on a PC keyboard.

1 Like