Not a movie per se, but one of the protagonists in my game is a veteran from the warez scene. He mentions BlueBeep, BBSs and Demoscene in the game :)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/

One word: SOPWITH

Also STRYKER.

My company's answer to your question: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/

:)

Some acoustic music instruments have fairly simple base waveforms which are "colored" by their shape and acoustics. I've once spent a few hours passing basic sound through modern effect VSTs with interesting results. I loved the video.

This is an incredible find. It would be amazingly cool if we could create an emulated environment for compiling and running Unix v4 from these sources.

SIMH emulates the PDP-11 (along with a ton of other early mini/microcomputers). It should be possible to run whatever's extracted from the tapes on SIMH. For example, the members of the TUHS mailing list were able to get an even earlier set of UNIX sources from 1972 running again, see here for more info: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/unix-jun72

They were able to get an even earlier set of UNIX sources running on the SIMH PDP-7 emulator. SEVEN.

It's really easy to run for yourself: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix/

Don't expect it to do much, but it's fascinating if you're interested in OS history.

Your parent commenter it's more than aware of Unix retroemulation and ITS...

Wild if we found out these early versions were rife with spyware and ads.

This will be the linchpin that proves SCO was right all along.

Or even worse, what if they vibe coded it?

For the same reason one visits a museum. If that doesn't make sense to you, then doing this won't either.

Unfortunately, I am working for an aerospace manufacturer that runs VAX VMS on emulators (which are quite expensive). We also run an even older operating system, OS2200.

The original VMS system manager who moved from 7000 series hardware to emulation was somewhat inquisitive, and we did install VMS 7 on simh. He retired and passed away some years ago, and none of his replacements have wanted to touch simh. I find that apathy appalling.

Given who wrote it, simh seems as close to an official VAX emulator as you are going to get.

The Charon/Stromasys sales staff described it as a toy.

In 1990's, maybe. Today simh-classic it's serious stuff up to the point a fork was made because some nut tried to tamper 1:1 disk/tape images with custom headers.

If you cannot learn from history, you'll have no future too, man.

That's why so many of these new age development tools, libraries and abstractions are such incredibly janky pieces of bloat that literally require what a few decades ago was supercomputers.

All downhill from here.

For nostalgia sake. It's from the computing period when there was a great influx of good idea's but still a huge shortage in memory and storage.

> a huge shortage in memory and storage

Maybe this explains why we have to call "creat" to "create" a file.

Idk about creat specifically but the utility names are all terse because you were interacting with the system on a 110-baud teletype.

For me, it's a chance to experience what it was like to use and develop software on these systems back in the day. For example, lately I've been writing some small apps and adding new kernel features to a variant of V6 Unix running on my PDP-11/05. It's humbling to see what it really took to be productive on these systems.

Some people even did y2k patches to BSD 4.3. Also, tons of 'modern' software could run on it you can get GCC 2.95 and GCC 3.4. Lynx, for instance. Or gopher and IRC clients. And, maybe, with a bit of luck, Lua and JimTCL.

If you are interested in hacker culture, you might enjoy the game I released yesterday, Outsider (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/).

The main character is an old school hacker (AND a cracker, which is a different thing) and the game leans heavily on the community's culture.

I own the poster version ("The Art of Atari, the poster collection") and it's great. I have three of their posters hanging in my office right now. It's not just nostalgia, the art is terrific.

EDIT: the poster collection now costs $600+ on Amazon. Wow.

Aargh. I've been wanting a large poster of Missile Command for a while now, but can't seem to find one at a decent price. Having one printed is difficult too as I can't find high-res, large image files of it.

This is really important work.

Humanity has done a decent job at preserving artifacts from our past despite wars and the effects of time on our cultural output. Throughout history, books, paintings, sculptures, music, and other forms of art were the available outlets for artistic and creative people. With the rise of computers, video games joined the set of cultural works produced by our species. While one could argue that the artistic value of David and Pac-Man is not comparable, I prefer to adopt a more open-minded view of games. It's great that some people are giving video games proper attention, considering the enormous amount of time we spend playing them and the place they occupy in our childhood memories.

I don't see why Pac-Man should be valued less than the statue of David. Of course they're different, but they both contributed to the culture heritage of the human species.

The article focuses on games that were never released or never even completed. It could be argued that those (unlike Pac-Man) did not contribute to cultural heritage. This is obviously not to say that their preservation is unimportant; I just think it should be compared more to unfinished/unpublished works of art, not the statue of David. It's more like The Salmon of Doubt than it is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

You're right. My comparison was more about sculptures as art vs the games as art. If you don't believe them to be equivalent at some level, it would be difficult to find this preservation work worthwhile.

That said, unfinished games are similar to manuscripts of an unfinished book. Many such manuscripts have been published throughout history and are, in my opinion, part of our cultural heritage too.

I actually wrote my first toy multitasker on a Gameboy Advance, although that's ARM7... Great little project. It's a joy to develop on an emulator with good debugging tools.

I was thinking more about the sharp sm83 chip. Gameboy Advanced is just too modern by comparison...

My upcoming story game, a love letter to SETI and the Hacker News crowd, offers some perspectives on the question: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/

It will be out in 2 weeks!