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

[autopope.livejournal.com]

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

Certainly not.

AIUI the criticality models for the British Magnox (first-generation, early 1950s) nuclear power plants were computerized, on some bizarre and arcane piece of valve-driven mainframe weirdness. By the late 1960s the original mainframe was unmaintainable -- but they needed the simulator, so they wrote an emulator for it (running on ICL mainframes of the day). It's probably still ticking along in a corner of some engineer's PC to this day, and will continue to do so until the last Magnox plant shuts down (within the next couple of years).

And then there's the ENIAC emulator.

Definitely not

[metageek.livejournal.com]

SIMH emulates a whole bunch of early machines. The oldest I recognize is the Royal McBee LGP-21 (as in the Story of Mel); the oldest I've run myself is the PDP-1.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

I recall an article in the 1970s computer trade press about a version of LEO (Lyon's Electronic Office, accountacy and stock control for the Lyons Tea Houses) software that had been written to run on 1950s hardware. Rather than rewrite it someone had written an emulator to allow the existing code to run on an ICT (later ICL) computer in the 1960s under the GEORGE 3 operating system. The hot news in the article was that GEORGE 3 had been emulated on current ICL 1900/2900 mainframes allowing the LEO application to run under nested emulations.

As for emulators for older hardware, there are ENIGMA machine emulators of various stripes -- some simple code and decode inputs, some do a graphical visualisation of the wheels going around. I presume there are emulations of Babbage's Differential and Analytical Engines out there too. How far back do you want to go? I once wrote a Stonehenge simulator for the Atari ST...

[seawasp]

The Z-Machine is also a major fusion research device with the maddest of mad scientist appearances in operation. One of the coolest machines EVAR.

Re: Definitely not

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Clarification: "run myself"—as in, I've fired up the emulator, meeting your "and running" clause. I've never seen a PDP-1.

Depends on your definition... well, no, I'm not sure even that helps.

[be-well-lowell.livejournal.com]

I can't really think of a historically interesting architecture that doesn't have an emulation that's still maintained. The Z-Machine is different from most of them in that it was an architecture that was never implemented in hardware, but even by that standard, the p-machine (Pascal's theoretical hardware) predates the Zork technology.

Re: Depends on your definition... well, no, I'm not sure even that helps.

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I wonder...yes! There was a hardware embodiment of the P-Machine! It looks like they took the CPU chips of the LSI-11 and replaced the microcode with something to interpret p-code.

Re: Depends on your definition... well, no, I'm not sure even that helps.

[metageek.livejournal.com]

It gets better. The first validated implementation of Ada was on the MicroEngine (the hardware P-Machine). Later it was sold for other computers...but not ported. Instead, they wrote MicroEngine emulators.

[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".