EMAS on 2966 (was Re: Xenix on the Acorn 32016)

Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote: The only programmer was Mark Taunton (also Ex Edinburgh, hence why the linker was written in Imp, and also why the link format had a lot in common with that of EMAS!). I think he may still be working for ARM somewhere. I bet he'd remember. I had a listing of it because I was the only other Imp programmer there and I was helping find a storage bug that was causing link errors for some program of mine. (The listing has a few of my annotations). It was written in Imp. I'm sure you'd remember if you'd seen it! Who is 'we' in this context? I can't imagine anyone just happening to have an ICL mainframe lying around, never mind the power to run it or the manpower to put it all back together again! (Hold on a sec... quick visit to Google... aha! so you're the curator at Bletchley Park! That explains a lot :-) Hadn't seen your Retrobeep site before! If I were still in the UK, I'd be happy to drop by with a shitload of Acorn hardware I grabbed before it headed for the dumpster) So yes, it would be fantastic to get EMAS on line again, and if your hardware works, it's definitely doable because the 2900 EMAS is the only one we actually have full binaries for! And the University has pretty complete archives on a CD jukebox where we could go fetch any binaries that we're missing. What's especially lucky is that we have a boot tape, which you're welcome to download and see how far it gets you: http://history.dcs.ed.ac.uk/archive/os/emas/emas2/boottape/ We have several people on the history project who might be interested in a project like this; If you think you might be serious, I would encourage you to join our mailing list and tell folks what you're thinking of and ask for volunters. Some are retired; two unfortunately work in the US. I'll put together a list of the people who would be relevant to this and we can contact them individually if you decide to start up a project. I would lay odds that if you could get funding and it became obvious that it was a serious project, we could get help from Edinburgh University (EUCS which used to be called ERCC) and pull in a lot more folks than just the ones already in the History Group. We don't have binaries for either the ICL4/75 version or any of the later IBM mainframe (or NEC/Fujistsu/Hitachi clone) versions, so although emulators exist for the IBM (Hercules), there would have been a major bootstrapping problem in cross-compiling the sources to IBM binaries. And although we had ICL2900 binaries, we have no ICL2900 emulator. It never occurred to me that we might find 2900 hardware somewhere. This could be a major break for our project if you decide to run with it and the hardware can be made serviceable. Also a working system would be the perfect place to start from to write a 2900 emulator. The biggest obstacle that I can think of would be building a disk image with all the relevant files on it. We have them as individual files, not as a disk image. But we have *major* amounts of source code and even an Imp compiler, so we ought to be able to hack the disk drivers around and create a user-level program to build a disk image... Incidentally, I discovered an ICL engineer on the net today, who worked on the EMAS hardware: http://www.whiteheadm.co.uk/html/30_years_in_computing.html - I'll be dropping him an email this evening to tell him about the Edinburgh project. If you start up a 2900 project, he sounds like someone well worth speaking to. Let's talk more about this, either here or offline, or preferably on the Edinburgh group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/edinburgh-computer-history/ Regards, Graham PS Does Bletchley have any systems that can read DECtapes? We still have a few tapes in our project from the PDP9 and others which we've never read back in. Including one for an operating system called "DECsys" which I believe some of the guys on this list are desperate to see!