Paleocomputing · Русский
Machines, languages and operating systems that worked and then vanished — sometimes along with ideas nobody has repeated since. We run them for real and look at what they could do.
Systems like these are usually shown through an emulator: a program that imitates old hardware. It tells you what would come out, but not what it cost — time inside it is invented.
We take the description of the circuit itself, where one survives, and compute the state of every wire on every clock. Then the numbers that come out are what a real chip did, not our guess about it. And then the system can be not only shown but asked.
A whole computer — processor, compiler, operating system, windows — that fits in six thousand lines and in one head. It boots in a browser, on the real description of the circuit. Thirteen labs and a handbook. Also installs into a Cozystack cluster — the catalog.
A Dutch machine of 1964 rebuilt from a 1971 simulator, and the multiprogramming system of the levels and the semaphores, whose code did not survive, written again from Dijkstra's papers. It boots in the browser from paper tape; you are the operator at its console.
A machine from 1961 in which buffer overflow does not exist as a class: the hardware checks array bounds itself. The emulator and an Algol compiler are ready; the write-up is being written.
Wirth's machine for Modula-2, direct ancestor of Oberon. Its own instruction set, its own graphics. It will be the second machine on the same instrumentation — and a test of whether that instrumentation travels at all.
The four designs of the US Department of Defense language competition: GREEN became Ada, RED lost the final in 1979, BLUE and YELLOW were dropped in 1978. All four rebuilt from their manuals, each with a compiler written in itself, and all run in the browser — with a NonStop-style kernel and Kubernetes written in RED.
A processor whose task scheduler and inter-processor channels are in hardware. A mesh of such chips assembled like a construction set. The instruction set is published.
Intel's attempt at a processor that understands objects and access rights at the level of the circuit. It failed on speed, but the documentation survives entire and is self-contained.
Novosibirsk's answer to Lilith: a processor for Modula, built in Akademgorodok. The material is barely digitised — here the archive work comes first and everything else after.