Well, that’s a mouth-full. It stands for ‘Vintage Computer Festival, Pacific North-West‘. It’s happening this weekend, and I’m presenting the Cray work I’ve been doing. Which reminded me that I should also update this page with direct links to all the random babbling I’ve done about this project over the years.

First off, all the articles about the Cray XMP and COS restoration work:

1. Prelude
2. A New Hope
3. The Hunt for the Red Bootcode
4. The Return of the Cray
5. The Matrix
6. First update
7. Needle in the Hay-stack
8. A Brave New World
9. Multiple Platforms
10. Jobs
11. Parallels
12. Turbo

The second series is about the newer, J90 (and YMP-el) simulation work, running UNICOS:

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

You can download the latest version of the simulator (including source code).

However if you’ve read all the above (as I’m sure you just did), you’ll know that the download page doesn’t actually contain functional UNICOS images: I don’t have the rights to distribute them. Because of that, I’ve put the simulator on-line, so – while you still can’t run it yourself – you can experience the full glory of a late 20th century supercomputer.

To anyone coming here because they ran into my exhibit on the VCF PNW, thank you again! For everyone else, still thank you for dropping by my page and enjoy!