Today (24th March) is Ada Lovelace Day, and I, along with >1,500 other people, pledged to write a blog post about a woman in technology whom I admire. This turned out to be more difficult than I thought, not because of a lack of inspirational women in technology, but rather instead due to it [...]
Last Thursday I attended a seminar on EMI computers, organised by the Computer Conservation Society and held at the London Science Museum. This was the 3rd computer history related event I’d attended, with the first two being part of celebrations for the British Computer Society’s 50th anniversary. I don’t think I’ll ever tire of [...]
As a youth I had a fairly respectable – for an amateur – electronic test equipment rig, and used to have all kinds of fun tinkering with radio and the like. But sadly as I grew older this gave way to make space for things erm, more grown up, such as records and computers. [...]
At long last the sources to Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) have been released. Whilst many today may not have heard of Multics there will be few in the field of computing that have not heard of UNIX, which is itself a hack on the name Multics. Due to its complexity Multics received a [...]
Friday evening I came home to discover that the 2GB SD card I had ordered almost 2 weeks ago had finally arrived (postal strikes).
Last night I got round to copying on to it an ISO of the OpenVMS VAX v7.3 install CD, and managed to boot this on the Nokia N800 via SimH [...]
Excited by last night’s success at turning my internet tablet into a VAX I thought I’d see if it could pretend to be an IBM mainframe, and in particular a System/370 running 1970s vintage IBM VM. I also knew I could fit this operating system on the spare SD card I had which [...]
So at the weekend I finally got round to rebuilding my home Linux server with Debian, and following which as I promised myself I would I went on to load the Maemo development environment.
Whilst setting up the dev environment was pretty straightforward the sheer amount of stuff that was getting installed did worry me a [...]
How do you lift a VAX 11/780 with one hand? Load it onto an Apple iPhone!
I really hope Jason succeeds with his iPhone port of SimH as a VAX (and PDP-11, PDP-8 etc) simulator running on a mobile phone would be super cool. Never mind those geeks getting a bash shell up to SSH into [...]
Last week whilst back in England visiting family I managed to (much to my 11 year old niece’s dismay) engineer a trip to Manchester’s Museum of Science & Industry. Hoping to see in operation the rebuild of the world’s first stored program computer, The Small-Scale Electronic Machine – alternatively and affectionately named ‘Baby’, which is [...]
Last month the British Computer Society held a series of events at Bletchley Park and in London to celebrate their 50th year. These were organised by BCS SIG the Computer Conservation Society and focused on the British contribution to computing. With the opportunity to witness Colossus and Turing Bombe rebuilds in operation, and hear talks [...]