13 Mar
2020
13 Mar
'20
8:36 a.m.
Great news. I look forward to trying it out. Other
than compilers, is
there much else to run on Prime at the moment? Do any applications
still exist to try and run? Is Prime Information (apparently the
platform's "killer app") available? Are there any games? Was there
the equivalent of a DECUS or Usenix through which freeware speed
across the community?
Michael,
The US national user group was NPUG. There were regional and maybe
local sub-groups. The software library, PULSE, was Prime-supported.
I'm not aware of many applications in captivity. In particular, I'm not
aware of any of the CAD/CAM or office automation software. The former
would of course be hard to run without the relevant graphics terminals,
and emulation of their connecting controllers.
There's a fair amount of material that we don't have packaged up for
download yet, including one or two versions of INFORMATION, some text
games, and most of a PULSE library from the Rev 17? era. The Georgia
Tech Software Tools environment is available. There are several full
screen editors, including Emacs and the Sheffield editor. We have the
indexed file handler, but not the DBMS. I've never seen the SyncSort,
Oracle or SPSS (and SAS?) packages, though they existed.
There's some chance of recovering some utility things like serial file
transfer software like x/y/z-modem, and maybe at least the host side of
one of the more integrated PC-to-Prime integration packages.
We're hoping the availability of the emulator will bring more things to
light, including software and documentation.
De