Simulators (was: Re: To all with interest in IBM 7090)

At 3:36 -0500 8/10/12, Jim wrote: ...RT-11? Thank you, Jerome! I don't use it but I certainly recognize the contribution you are making and appreciate it! More generally, SIMH, MESS, etc. which allow almost anyone to fire up their own PDP, Color Computer, etc. and immerse in the 1980 computing environment are *wonderful* things. The sole complaint I have with some of these is that it takes (longer than my attention span) to get them to do "hello world". In many cases they are written for a specific platform, by people who know what they are doing and who make reasonable, but sometimes inaccurate, assumptions that their users do as well. I can easily see great merit to a museum display with (say) a working, living, breathing Color Computer, and a box of paper chits with a URL (or barcode?) pointing to a website on which appears (1) executable binaries (MESS?) for most commodity OS's (iOS, Droid, MacOSX, Windows 98, Windows 7, Linux ELF x86, Linux ELF AMD-64, ...?), and (2) a very explicit list of instructions to configure the binary to do just what the user was doing at the display. Mom and daughter walk in, Mom lights up and says "Oh, I remember this! Check it out, I can make it print the squares of every number from 1 to 100 just like *this* <clicky clicky>..." Doughter grabs the chit, whips out her Droid, fumbles for a few minutes, "Mom, it's not working!" Mom looks, says, "Oh, you need to say FOR I= 1 TO 100, not 1 OT 100!" Ignition... We can't *all* have a Cray. But most of us can get the programming experience. The display is needed (and access to it, and maintenance of it!) but the simulator is also needed. -- - Mark 210-379-4635 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Large Asteroids headed toward planets inhabited by beings that don't have technology adequate to stop them: Think of it as Evolution in Fast-Forward.