🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <82...@aerospace.AERO.ORG>, s...@aerospace.aero.org (Scott "TCB"
Turner) writes:
|> The Computer Museum actually does have a punch card machine
|> accessible, though it is a bit hard to find.  And there's a machine
|> running Logo for those who want to sit down and try a little
|> programming; a better choice than Fortran 66 in my opinion.
|> 
|> And not all the demos are mindless.  I particularly liked the
|> Symbolics that finds routes between any two street addresses in Boston
|> and verbalizes the directions (with hints such as "watch for the pink
|> building on the left"!), the machine that attempts to play harmony with
|> you on the keyboard, and the computer drawing program.

I'm pleased to hear that they've expanded in the right directions
since I was there.  I don't remember any of this stuff from about
2 years ago, except for a very large pen plotter that was continuously
drawing cityscapes the whole time, and may be what you mean by the
computer drawing program.  Was the punch card machine working or
just sitting there collecting dust?

I think the main point is that computers are dynamic objects, not
just lumps of metal and plastic.  Who really cares about seeing a
large ugly box with lots of tubes if it can't actually DO anything?

Preservation of actual working hardware may be difficult, but I am
quite attracted to Earl Boebert's idea of virtual preservation, i.e.,
simulate an old computer on a new one.  This would preserve the
"look and feel" of an architecture even if keeping hardware working
were prohibitively expensive.  An ENIAC would be more expensive to
build today than the original was, but it should be possible to
simulate one, right?  Anyone know how the thing was programmed?
My guess is some kind of plug board, but that's just a guess.  Now
imagine Xeniac running on your Sun, with mouse buttons in place of
the plugs...

Does anyone know what the first stored program computer was?  I'm
sure we could simulate its machine language, or assembler if it
had one.  I wouldn't be surprised if someone has already written
a simulator for PDP-11 assembly language in C, an amusing turnabout
if there ever was one.  I can just see some history student in 2050
writing about the dawn of the computer age, running a PDP-10 simulator
written in C on a C simulator written in the current language of
choice.  (Fortran '43 ? :-)

Flame me if you will, but I wouldn't mind having a simulator for a
TRS-80 with Level 2 BASIC and 16K RAM, which was THE cool machine
to have when I was in high school.  I still have printouts of some
(not all, sigh) of the programs I wrote for it, as well as Lunar
Lander, B-1 Bomber, and Star Trek!

For preservation of this type to really be successful, both docs
and software for these old systems must also be preserved.  Any
popular programs written after 1980 are probably safe, since thousands
of packrat users have copies of source code on line or on floppies.
(I still have every significant program I wrote since starting college
still on line, and my available disk space is expanding much faster
now than I can write.)  Whole operating systems may be tougher.  I'm
sure early versions of UNIX still exist somewhere, but where?  That
would certainly be of historical interest.

--
Louis Howell

  "A few sums!" retorted Martens, with a trace of his old spirit.  "A major
navigational change, like the one needed to break us away from the comet
and put us on an orbit to Earth, involves about a hundred thousand separate
calculations.  Even the computer needs several minutes for the job."