1 Oct
2009
1 Oct
'09
1:06 p.m.
On Oct 1, 2009, at 11:48 AM, Brad Parker wrote:
Seth Morabito wrote:
That is some potentially very good news! Thanks for asking about this!
I think I asked about this several years ago, but
I thought I might
try my luck again.
Is anyone aware of any surviving ARPAnet IMP System Software, in
any form?
After talking with a person from BBN it might be possible to read
some old 7-track tapes with some code on them. Apparently the
earliest versions were written in PDP-1 assembler with macros.
Later a cross compiler was written for TENEX. I'll dog it for a while and see what happens. I
suppose the next
question is, "does anyone have docs on the Honeywell 516"? and
is there a simulator?
There is not (yet) a 516 simulator, but Bob Supnik's SIMH does have an
H316 simulator. See: http://simh.trailing-edge.com/h316.html
Later IMPs were H316s, so possibly some of the code on those 7-tracks
is written for them?
I have no idea how much work would be involved in adding a 516 mode to
SIMH, nor how hard it would be to simulate the bit-serial IMP-host
interface hardware, but I'd certainly be game to help with that.
-Seth