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Ask HN: What major systems have no emulators and will be lost to history?

7 点作者 throwawaybutwhy将近 4 年前
Hercules, SIMH, virtual Apollo Guidance Computer, DOSBox, and other emulators exist.<p>Let&#x27;s assume we have the requisite tapes&#x2F;source code listings (which is a non-trivial assumption). Since there&#x27;s no hardware, we are stranded on ebb tide if for whatever reason we decide to run the code. What layers of computing history are the most notable and vulnerable to oblivion?

4 条评论

Dracophoenix将近 4 年前
Most people don&#x27;t think of them as computer systems, but late-90s and early-2000s phone and PDA OSes. Specifically, EPOC32&#x2F;Symbian, Apple Newton, BlackberryOS, PalmOS, Qualcomm RexOS, and Windows CE&#x2F;PocketPC&#x2F;Mobile (and its later incarnation Windows Phone&#x2F;10 Mobile)<p>Newer calculators, like the TI-Nspire Cx-series and HP Prisms.<p>Proprietary non-linear editing systems from the 80s and 90s before the switchover to software.<p>A few legacy systems that haven&#x27;t quite been emulated yet are BeOS, and RISCOS, certain proprietary Unix implementations like A&#x2F;UX, Amix, Irix, NeXtOS, Apollo DomainOS, AIX, PA-RISC, Ultrix, etc., and Japanese PCs like the PC-98, PC-88, Sharp X1, Sharp X6800, and FM-Towns<p>Minicomputer hardware, like VAX Machines, DEC Alpha Systems, and DECstations, are also lacking in good emulation, but the OSes (OpenVMS and Ultrix) are available to hobbyists.<p>Itanium has not so far been emulated, so IA-64 versions of Windows are probably going to be lost (as no more IA-64 processors are being made) should nothing be done.
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wsh将近 4 年前
The IBM i (formerly AS&#x2F;400) platform, despite its popularity over several decades as a server for business applications—and its importance in computing history as an example of features such as object-oriented, single-level storage—doesn’t have a comprehensive, generally-available emulator, as far as I know.<p>For anyone outside IBM, developing one might be difficult: neither the original, low-level CISC instruction set used through the 1990s, nor the PowerPC AS extension to the POWER architecture that replaced it, has been fully described in public documentation.
PaulHoule将近 4 年前
Circa 2005 I worked at an academic library where they were profoundly pessimistic about digital preservation: they thought Apple ][ programs and C64 word processing documents would soon become impossible to access.<p>Videogame and home computer emulation proved the opposite, that with a different organizational structure, preservation was possible, even easy. (It&#x27;s not hard at all to write an emulator if you&#x27;re not picky about performance.)<p>For a system to be unemulatable it has to be unloved. If it&#x27;s unloved does it matter if it&#x27;s emulatable?
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detaro将近 4 年前
<i>Major</i> systems seems difficult to come up with a good candidate. There, I&#x27;d worry more about trend to DRM, dependencies on servers&#x2F;online services, ... as a hurdle to software preservation.<p>I don&#x27;t have numbers on this, but have the impression that more often the software is the main issue, where nothing is known while some hardware and hardware documentation survived in a state that can be reverse-engineered.