The oldest emulated architecture?

[dsrtao]

The Z-Machine is the notional hardware that runs Zork and all the other Infocom text adventures, as well as thousands of interactive fiction games written since that time. There's never been a commercial hardware implementation, that I know of. (Some student projects, I think.)

There's a project to write a Z-Machine emulator for Android; there's already such an emulator for iPhone and PalmOS. ( http://code.google.com/p/twisty )

Is this the oldest architecture that still has people writing and running emulators?

Comments

[jducoeur]

From the sound of things, I think the correct statement may be "oldest emulation architecture that still has people writing novel code for". That one I could believe might be true. There are a lot of older architectures being emulated, but mainly for legacy code, it sounds like; people still write to the Z-machine, though...

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Maybe. I think there are probably people playing with writing code for, say, the PDP-1. (I did, sometime last winter—although it was just some minor playing around with PDP-1 Lisp.)

Perhaps "oldest emulation architecture with a nontrivial development community".