trebonian - Slashdot User

Submission + - Visual ARM1 - Celebrating ARM's 25th Anniversary (visual6502.org)

Submitted by trebonian on Friday November 27, 2015 @06:13PM

trebonian writes: Today is the 25th anniversary of ARM Ltd., UK. To celebrate and honor their amazing work, we present the Visual ARM1, created in collaboration with some of ARM's founding engineers.

Designed by Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber before there was an ARM Ltd., the Acorn RISC Machine was the first of a line of processors that power our cell phones and tablets today. Unlike our projects based on microscope images, the Visual ARM was created from a resurrected .cif chip layout file, used under our license agreement with ARM. We also photographed one of the few ARM1 chips at very high resolution, and our photograph is featured at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge.

Credit goes to ARM founding engineers John Biggs for inspiring the project, discovering the tape, and recovering a usable .cif file, Lee Smith for spotting the variable record format used to encode the file (an artifact of the VMS on Acorn's VAX that at first appeared to be widespread corruption of the file), to Cambridge University Computing Services for reading the Exabyte tape, and to ARM founder Dave Howard for help unraveling the VLSI CIF dialect. Our chip simulation and visualization was developed by Barry Silverman, Brian Silverman, Ed Spittles, and Greg James.

Submission + - Futureproofing artifacts-Spacewar! 1962 in HTML5 (oversigma.com)

Submitted by

trebonian

on Tuesday March 01, 2011 @05:58PM

trebonian writes: "In 1997 we posted a playable version of the Spacewar!, the first graphical computer game. Spacewar! was written by Russell et al at MIT in the early 60s.

We did not re-implement the game. Rather, we found the original source code, rebuilt it to get an authentic binary and ran it on a PDP-1 emulator that we wrote in Java.

We chose Java to implement the PDP-1 because we believed at the time — correctly as it turned out — that a Java version would survive the browser wars. Also, it would not require any effort to keep it running on all platforms well past the turn of the millennium, and through the traffic peaks of Spacewar's 40th and 45th birthday.

It's now getting close to 15 years later. We would not want to bet that in another 15 years a Java program will still run on the latest popular platforms.

As a hedge to the future, and in an effort to continue the preservation of this significant digital artifact, we've now ported the PDP-1 emulator to Javascript/HTML5.

It's posted at http://spacewar.oversigma.com/html5/. This should see the game through Spacewar!'s 50th (and hopefully 60th) birthday.

Expect another update around 2025."

Submission + - Preserving Great Tech for Posterity - the 6502 (swtch.com)

Submitted by trebonian on Thursday January 06, 2011 @07:57PM

trebonian writes: For great old hardware products like the MOS 6502 ( used in the Apple II, the C64, the Nintendo NES). the details of the designs have been lost or forgotten. While there have been great efforts to reverse engineer the 6502 from the outside, there has not been the hardware equivalent of the source code — until now. As Russell Cox states: (http://research.swtch.com/2011/01/mos-6502-and-best-layout-guy-in-world.html)
"A team of three people accumulated a bunch of 6502 chips, applied sulfuric acid to them to strip the casing and expose the actual chips, used a high-resolution photomicroscope to scan the chips, applied computer graphics techniques to build a vector representation of the chip, and finally derived from the vector form what amounts to the circuit diagram of the chip: a list of all 3,510 transistors with inputs, outputs, and what they're connected to. Combining that with a fairly generic (and, as these things go, trivial) “transistor circuit” simulator written in JavaScript and some HTML5 goodness, they created an animated 6502 web page that lets you watch the voltages race around the chip as it executes. For more, see their web site visual6502.org."

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