[Simh] [simh] a possible new virtual machine project

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Today's news carried the announcement of the release of the source
code for Multics, the famous timesharing system on GE 600 series
(later, Honeywell 6000 series) 36-bit mainframes:

	http://www.multicians.org/multics.html
	http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/source/Multics_Internet_Server/Multics_sources.html

Although I maintain an extensive Web site about virtual machines at

	http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/vm.html

I am unware of any VM for the GE/Honeywell 36-bit systems.  The SIMH
H316/156 simulator is for a 16-bit minicomputer.

Multics ran from its development years of 1964--1969 up to 2000, and
its features and misfeatures had a large effect on Ken Thompson, who
was one of the Multics team before he went off to build Unix with
Dennis Ritchie and colleagues at Bell Labs and thereby change the
history of computing.

For more on Multics, see

	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics

and several books listed at the end of that page.

SIMH already contains a PDP-10 emulator (and there is also the
independent KLH10 software implementation of a PDP-10).

Having recently been through parts of the hardware manual for the GE
635, I would expect that the effort needed for a VM for it would be
comparable to that for the PDP-10 emulators (11K lines in SIMH, 79K
lines in KLH10).  Thus, the task is decidedly nontrivial, but if it
has not been done by anyone yet, perhaps some SIMH list members would
be interested.

There is discussion of the topic of resurrecting the host machine at

      http://www.multicians.org/multics.html

Some historical manuals for the GE and Honeywell systems can be found
here:

	http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ge/
	http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/honeywell/series6000/

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------