For those of us who are interested in computer architecture, there are a lot of interesting architectures from the past that we don't see anymore: the DEC PDP-8 with its 12-bit words and minimalist instruction set, the IBM 7090 with its 36 bit words, character oriented machines like the IBM 1401, architectures like many of the early IBM machines that, rather than general registers, had the accumulator, the multiplier-quotient (MQ), and some index registers (IBM 1130/1800, IBM 7090, many other machines).
I am thinking it would be interesting to have a "game", if you want to call it that, that would provide emulators for interesting old architectures. Reserved pointers in low storage would point to routines for reading, printing, and talking to the console, so people would not have to learn an operating system at the same time they are learning the architecture. There are open-source emulators available for many old architectures, and architecture manuals are available on bitsavers.org.
This would clearly be a niche game, and I would not expecting it to be a moneymaker. I was thinking about it because I think exploring old architectures is fun, but when I read, for example, about people getting an IBM 7090 emulator running, I think "That would be fun, but then I would have to learn IBSYS, the 7090 operating system, which would be a big time investment, and I couldn't do any real work on it."
What do you think?
I am thinking it would be interesting to have a "game", if you want to call it that, that would provide emulators for interesting old architectures. Reserved pointers in low storage would point to routines for reading, printing, and talking to the console, so people would not have to learn an operating system at the same time they are learning the architecture. There are open-source emulators available for many old architectures, and architecture manuals are available on bitsavers.org.
This would clearly be a niche game, and I would not expecting it to be a moneymaker. I was thinking about it because I think exploring old architectures is fun, but when I read, for example, about people getting an IBM 7090 emulator running, I think "That would be fun, but then I would have to learn IBSYS, the 7090 operating system, which would be a big time investment, and I couldn't do any real work on it."
What do you think?
