[inforoots] Re: Spacecraft Pioneer and it's data on old media problem

[Carl Baltrunas]

On Oct 1, 2007, at 10:37 AM, Rafael Skodlar wrote:
> Well, everybody is looking for $ sources. Are we (CHM) any different? 
> The fact remains that we, at least some people on this list, have 
> expertize and means in some cases to help in such a project.
>
> My intension was not to ask for people to send $ to that organization 
> but to open a discussion and possibly give some interested people a 
> lead to untapped (?) source of working hardware in the future.

>> And, why use old iron, when an emulator, ie. friends at SIMH or (if 
>> it is a DEC-10) KLH-10, can run circles around the old iron without 
>> the need for massive parallel processors.
>>
> It's obvious to me that OS emulation is not a big issue these days, I 
> work with virtualization on a daily basis. We can easily emulate old 
> systems like PDP-1 or IBM1620 etc. However, it's watching or working 
> with real things that's fun. Crunching usable data at the same time 
> would be even more fun, not to mention the possibility for publicity 
> that could be gained from it IMO. If they end up with hardware being 
> thrown out then it would be worthwhile for somebody else to run with 
> it. Why not CHM?

Except for the power requirements, I agree, it would be fun to have a 
section of the CHM that has old hardware actually running, doing 
something useful.  For example allowing amateur chess enthusiasts to 
play against Deep Blue knowing that they most likely will not win :-), 
(I can hear it now, "I lost in 14 minutes!", or "Ha! I lasted 26 
minutes before losing!")  [Note: According to Wikipedia 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Deep_Blue), the CHM only has one of 
the 2 racks that comprised Deep Blue]
>
>> A terrible side note: Does anyone have a Cray or Connections machine 
>> emulator that runs faster than the originals?
>>
> Which Cray? I don't have any for either one. Latest Crays run some 
> version of Unix, Unicos I believe, so it's most likely easier to deal 
> with than other architectures. Many programs were written in "common 
> languages" so porting should not be a big problem.

No particular Cray, but if they are running some flavor of Unix, it's 
likely not worth emulating the hardware on another (likely Unix box) 
just to see the native environment, or just to say "We did it!".  A 
shell could probably be written much easier to provide the 
idiosyncrasies and look and feel without all the headaches of trying to 
get it just right.
>
> I found the following interesting read: 
> http://www.faqs.org/faqs/computer/system/cray/faq/
> -- 
> Rafael

-Carl