[Simh] SIMH and physical hardware

[Larry Baker]

Zack,

On Feb 9, 2016, at 9:41 PM, Zachary Kline <zkline at speedpost.net> wrote:

> Message: 6
> Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2016 21:41:03 -0800
> From: Zachary Kline <zkline at speedpost.net>
> To: Simh <simh at trailing-edge.com>
> Subject: [Simh] SIMH and physical hardware
> Message-ID: <74262973-D9D8-4EEA-98C7-7BB3763E8ED0 at speedpost.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
> 
> This is around 50% humorous, but it’s still a thing I’ve been thinking about lately. From a newbie’s perspective, all SIMH machines are very similar. The worst thing about emulation is that the “feel,” of the original hardware doesn’t seem to be there. Simh can emulate tons of hardware from different manufacturers, but none of that will tell me what it was like to actually use the devices in a physical sense.
> As a blind user, I’m doubly interested in this kind of physicality because I experience the world through touch and sound. I have little conception of the shape or size of many of these notional machines, and they are all reduced to various abstractions at a console prompt. It’s hard to imagine a thing I was far too young to experience.
> I was reminded of an Apple II emulator I saw once, sadly not accessible, which made the appropriate disk drive noises in use.

This reminds me of my early days using PDP-11/34s and RSX-11M.  One sat in the same room as the rack with the computer and the disk drives.  RK05s: a 2.4 MB 14 inch single platter inside a cartridge.  When you went through the edit-compile-link steps over and over and over, you could always tell when the link step was getting close to finishing by the high pitch chattering of the disk drive.  Thanks for the memory.

> Its kind of useless from a  practical standpoint, but a lot of my interest in these machines isn’t practical to begin with. I want to explore an earlier kind of computing, but don’t expect to get a job with it or have anything beyond some entertainment. 
> I really don’t know what, if anything, can be done to bridge this weird disconnect. Actual hardware is probably gradually fading out, and in any case probably wouldn’t be accessible from my perspective anyway.
> 
> Any thoughts? Apologies for the disjointed post, it’s rather late. ;)

Larry Baker
US Geological Survey
650-329-5608
baker at usgs.gov

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