I have been porting sections of the business software I mentioned earlier from QuickBASIC on DOS (nice to have the source code!) to Tcl on Linux using ChatGPT to automate the conversion. It gets it right the first try, almost every time.
The BASIC code is very simple by modern standards, and Tcl overlaps BASIC neatly, making conversion easy.
Unfortunately it's just a short-term stopgap to add some features management suddenly can't live without, that weren't practical to implement in BASIC/DOS. They'll replace the whole stack with a commercial product and support contract when they find something they like.
Now that I think of it, some of the software was for Motorola radios. He was not a licensed Motorola shop (Kenwood), so I believe getting more modern software would have been difficult or very expensive, if even possible.
A friend works for an airline as a flight simulator tech. Their entire software stack, including the compiler and OS, is FAA-certified.
Then their ancient Honeywell(?) mainframes reached end-of-life they scouted for compatible hardware, of which there was none. The cost of certifying new software, plus the time involved, was astronomical. So, after consulting with the FAA, they paid a hardware company to clone the ancient mainframes in modern silicon. The FAA signed off on it, and they had all-new computers - much smaller than the originals - running the old stack.
There's a mechanical tank simulator at the Swiss Military Museum that was built in the 1970s and used for actual service before being retired and becoming a museum piece:
The simulator has a simulated cockpit for the user, which controls an armature with a camera attached that is piloted around a miniature battlefield environment and provides a video feed to the cockpit. A "foot" on the armature senses terrain elevation changes, which are then supplied as movement feedback to the simulated tank cockpit. All of this was controlled by a 1970s mainframe, for which replacement parts were unavailable so it was replaced, in the museum exhibit, with a Raspberry Pi.
Custom chips aren't as expensive as you think. About a few million dollars for the design and a hundred thousand chips, way out of reach for a hobbyist, but accessible to large enough companies. Just because it's opaque to us software people doesn't mean it's not a real industry you can buy things from.
Situation: Software-1 on Platform-1, both certified.
Time-evolution: P1 is deprecated, replaced by uncertified P2, but S1 remains certified.. just nowhere certified to run yet.
Solution: There's another software S2 which originally vouched for P1, itself still certified, which can still be used to certify P2.
Counterfactual?: If S1 were deprecated in favor of new S3.. there'd be no plan to certify it!
The problem: None of this actually makes any sense! But we're trying to fake due diligence. Everyone knows the hardware/platforms kinda need to be certified with respect to each other anyway, but if we did it that way it would all be even more expensive an time-consuming.
Doesn't seem crazy to me. Which one do you suppose needs more proof of correctness: a cake recipe, or the oven you bake the cake in? The recipe has to be correct or the cake won't work, but the oven just has to hold a temperature.
Ovens vary greatly. There is no consistency in how even the heat is in the space, the airflow through the space, how much and how fast the temperature varies around the set temperature, etc. These things all do affect how things bake up and often people have to tweak recipes for their specific oven.
In a case where something is safety critical the computer is super important as very subtle errors could cause catastrophic consequences. This is why you get into things like running software on 3+ computers concurrently depending on how fail-safe something has to be.
When Xerox established PARC, they asked the assembled scientists what computer they wanted. The majority view was a DEC PDP-10 KA10, with the BBN memory management unit that let it run Tenex (the ancestor of DEC TOPS-20). Xerox couldn't really buy a competitor's mainframe, so they built MAXC (maximum access computer), which was a complete emulation of the Tenex machines.
>MAXC (maximum access computer), which was a complete emulation of the Tenex machines.
Compuserve also had a software dependency on the PDP-10 and Decsystem 20, and when those machines were no longer available they bought a company making clones so they could continue to manufacture them for themselves. The company they bought, Microsolutions, was Mark Cuban's first startup.
making clones of mainframes (IBM's) had been a big area of intellectual property litigation, but also facing monopolization investigations, IBM had to allow them. They were referred to as "plug compatibles".
The clone hardware manufacturer was Systems Concepts. Microsolutions was a software play -- I think they had something to do with trying to port 1022/1032.
IBM released the PC XT/370[1], built around a pair of 68000s and an 8087 with custom microcode to emulate System/370 instructions, in 1983.
It's not hard to imagine a similar system fabricated around an open or licensed processor core today being well within the budget of a major airline today.
Software emulation would no doubt be less expensive, but there could have been regulatory reasons for building plug-compatible hardware.
It could be an FPGA. Given enough gates, and the know-how to program them, you can make an FPGA emulate anything. Speed and efficiency could be better or worse, but if you're targeting old hardware, better is likely.
I mean...there's some precedent. The XKL TOAD ("Ten On A Desk") implements the PDP-10 instruction set, and will happily run TOPS-10/TOPS-20. LCM had one doing just that.
It's tempting to write a PDP-10 emulator for the Atari ST called TOAST.
FWIW I'm developing "tiny-titan", a stand-in for Cambridge's Titan mainframe that talks to Heinz Lemke's 1972 PIXIE program over an emulated version of Neil Wiseman's PDP-7 <=> Titan link. It doesn't emulate Titan itself, just the conversation PIXIE had with it, so the unmodified 1972 PDP-7 code dials home and uploads its drawings.
>Titan was the prototype of the Atlas 2 computer developed by Ferranti and the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in Cambridge, England. It was designed starting in 1963, and in operation from 1964 to 1973.
Thanks! I'm in the process of bailing from Medium, and I'm moving my stuff to a reimplemention of HyperTIES, the hypermedia browser I developed for NeWS in 1987-1990 at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab, and I'm dogfooding it to publish all my other stuff:
Here's a part of the demo I was giving at EduCom in October 1988 at the Sun booth on the trade show floor, across from the NeXT booth, where Steve Jobs and Bill Joy came by. Because he had shaved his beard, I didn't realize it was Bill Joy when I was showing him a demo of his head popping up! He took it pretty well though, better than Jobs.
Meh, old architectures are relatively simple and you can get 95% of those via fpga softcores (some freely available, some paid) and run them on fpga. The rest can be implemented by a proper ee team.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE-600_series from the 36-bit era which turned out to be a sweet-spot for Lisp; also "famous" for running Multics (old joke flipped: "which was many of whatever unix is one of")
GE sold it's division to Honeywell, and from there to Group Bull (French) and then to NEC (Japan)
Also immortalized as the name of the "gecos" field in the UNIX passwd(5) file, described in the v7 man page[1] as "GCOS job number, box number, optional GCOS user-id" (GCOS = GECOS after the Honeywell acquisition).
Hardware is more amenable to static analysis than running programs which may receive an arbitrary number of inputs and express an arbitrary number of possible intermediate states.
I am interested in how firmware is treated, since perhaps in the case of these old machines it's small enough to be analyzable or at least cloned bit-for-bit.
I have a client with some business software that runs on DOS. They have a dozen seats. A single Linux server gives serves a dozen VNC sessions with the software running in DOSEMU. Printing is done with the Linux print stack and three Ethernet print servers.
It has been working without a hitch since 2008. Oh, so has the server, which is a VirtualBox VM.
Yep. Boston Dynamics has been dependent on military contracts since their founding in 1992.
The "no more military weapons" statement seems to have been after they were acquired by Hyundai.
Boston Dynamics' business is, basically, "mobility platforms." After all these years the basic development is all done; now they're pivoting to commercial markets.
There's no real difference between a "murderbot" and, say, a police riot-control platform, a fire-fighting platform, a forestry platform, etc.
They might not be explicitly developing weapon packages any more, but there are plenty of other companies who will be happy to take the money to build them onto Boston Dynamics' platforms.
We had two broadcast TV channels where we lived when I was growing up in the 1970s. My Dad signed up for cable TV. It ran 24/7 instead of 6AM-to-midnight (yes, broadcast TV went off the air at midnight in many areas) and it had no commercials.
A few years after getting cable, they started running ads on it. Dad for furious. "No ads" was one of the things he was paying for, as he saw it.
Ironically, half the ads - at least in the beginning - were urging people to sign up for cable TV. But people couldn't see the ads unless they already had cable TV...
Not entirely true. The "premium" channels (HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, Bravo, The Movie Channel, etc.) never had ads.
Then there were channels like Nickelodeon that originally had no ads, then added them in the mid 80's. I remember this distinctly because I was annoyed by it. My parents got cable in 1980 when it first came to our area.
Sage Accounting is prone to various connectivity gollywobbles between the server and workstations. The first troubleshooting recommendation is to turn off IPv6. About 75% of that time, the problem then goes away.
