[Simh] SIMH and physical hardware

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Hi,

I felt a twinge of sorrow reading your post but I am glad you posted it.

There are certainly many people on this list who do or did own actual
hardware but you have to remember many people who used these machines back
in the day never saw the machine or came near it. In most universities and
businesses the machines were kept in what today would be called a server
room, along with air conditioning and cabling either on the floor or under
it (raised floor). The vast majority of users and programmers sat in
terminal rooms or at their desks in cubes or offices and were connected to
the machine by physical cabling. You typically never saw the blinkinlights
or heard the machine or felt the disk drives shaking the floor or the
heat coming off the CPU cabinet. One of the things I remember most is how
loud an IBM 1403 printer is with the hood raised. It's almost to the point
of being unbearable because of how shrill and loud it was.

Again, I'm not saying many people didn't have that experience or that it
isn't important on many levels. I'm just saying the majority of programmers
and end users didn't have that experience so you didn't miss anything
except the comeraderie of being in a terminal room with a bunch of your
friends when the system crashed and hearing everybody groan at the same
time. Or being there in the middle of something when the power failed in
the whole building and losing your work (maybe or maybe not, depending on
what machine you were using). A lot of PDP gear was in small labs where
most students didn't go. At least that's the way it was in the universities
and schools I visited.

The same was true in big companies that used mainframes. The programmers
typically were not allowed in the machine room. The doors had combination
locks and only authorized personnel like operators and IBM's support staff
were allowed in there. Slipping into the machine room with an operator
buddy was grounds for dismissal in some of the places I have worked. Some
data centers in universities and business did have glass walls onto the
floor. But most did not.

The main way that we get the sense today of "wow this is great" is seeing
the terminal displays with the same layouts and prompts as we did in the old
days. For that I am truly sorry you don't have a way you can relate to it.
Imagining what that must be like is painful. On the other hand since you
said you were not around in those days it isn't as bad as it could be.

Bottom line these emulators are keeping old systems and software alive far
past the time that most people can longer use them. You still get a chance
to use old OS, software, and tools and "see" how things worked from that
point of view. You get to use some great quality code the likes of which we
haven't seen in a long time.

Thanks for your post and best regards. Happy vintage computing!


On Tue, 9 Feb 2016 21:41:03 -0800
Zachary Kline <zkline at speedpost.net> wrote:

> 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. 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. ;)
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