[fpc-other] Yet another mainframe emulator

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Bernd Oppolzer wrote:

> The offspring was the TR 440, which was a large time-sharing machine
> with display monitors, virtual storage and (in the end) up to 3 processors.
> It was used at the universities in Germany througout the 70s and early 80s
> and most of the students of Computer Science (called Informatik in Germany)
> grew up with this machines at this time. There was a Pascal compiler 
> written
> in Kaiserslautern first and completed in Stuttgart later, which was a 
> port of
> the Zurich P4 compiler, and it had all the features, that were normal at 
> this
> time, that is, an interactive debugger, and dumps which printed the 
> variables
> in the layout of the programming language, not hexadecimal, that is:
> variable names and values.
> 
> It was in use at the Stuttgart university from 1973 to 1980, and I studied
> Informatik there from 1977 until 1985, so I spent some days and nights
> with this machine. After that, we got a VAX 11/780; that was a very nice
> machine, too.
> 
> The Telefunken manuals are at the Deutsches Museum in Munich,
> but also at bitsavers.org - I have some private copies. There are not
> many people today that still know this platform.

The big question of course is whether anybody has any systems software. 
There are of course available copies of older IBM OSes, Burroughs Large 
Systems and ICL 1900 run on emulators, and I believe that the project to 
run an emulated Cray-I (on a single FPGA) is doing fairly well after a 
disc pack was read with difficulty.

But even allowing that programs from 30 years ago were vastly smaller 
than they are today, typing in something from a listing is a horrid job: 
I've done it for a CDC APL implementation in Pascal, and I've got a 
nagging suspicion (but can never be really sure) that the bugs aren't 
entirely my fault.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]