Intro

Good news everyone! A very nice gentlemen - who decided to remain anonymous - contacted Chris and me, saying he has some X-MP tapes we might be interested in. As it turned out he has an absolute treasure chest of material, in fact much more than 'just' a collection of X-MP tapes. This gave me a reason to re-start my work on the Cray simulator project, in fact I've decided to start a new series.

Instead of writing these enormous articles, that take forever to finish and no one reads, I decided to write shorter pieces on just one topic. Hopefully it will not be that taxing on your patience and I can crank out material more frequently.

The other reason to grab the pen keyboard again is that I have some great news to report: A very nice gentlemen - who decided to remain anonymous - contacted Chris and me, saying he has some X-MP tapes we might be interested in. As it turned out he has an absolute treasure chest of material, in fact much more than 'just' a collection of X-MP tapes. But more on that later.

First a disclaimer though: unfortunately, while I have a copy of some interesting pieces of his collection, I don't have permission to publish any of the stuff. So this time around I can only show you what it looks like, but I can't put my work online. To be absolutely precise I can put my work online but it's pretty useless without the bits that I can't. Maybe eventually I manage to get the right permissions to publish the full work as well.

Online access

What I decided to instead was to put the whole, running simulator on-line. It can be found with login information here: http://cray.modularcircuits.com/

Download

None of the above means of course that I can't release my own source-code. You can head over to GitHub and grab the latest version. It supports the XMP, YMP-el, J90 and SV1 family of machines.

UNICOS installation material

The other day I felt nostalgic and wondered over to the great archive.org site, originally to look for Commodore 64 material. Then, I thought, what the hell! and typed ‘cray' into the search box. Lo and behold, a lot of hits! There are manuals, a CD image with some marketing or teaching material on it, but among them, two interesting CD images:

Both are UNICOS install images. I'll have to see if they are complete and what version (and for what machine) they are, but I wanted to share the news: it appears that there is now a publicly available OS image (maybe even two) for my simulator.

Tales from the trenches

Finally, as far as the story goes, the following pieces are available:

  1. A Bridge too Far
  2. That Obscure Object of Desire
  3. Exploring the CD
  4. A New Simulator, part 1
  5. A New Simulator, part 2
  6. A New Simulator, part 3
  7. The UNICOS file-system
  8. Oldies but goodies
  9. A debug session
  10. To SSH and beyond
  11. The attack of cc

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