Emulating Other Computers

While emulation of today's Apple Macintosh computers is a shaky business at best, emulation of machines that are no longer manufactured or are no longer commercially viable is a bustling arena. Why? One word: Games. Well, actually there are two reasons: games, and historical interest.

Games are an obvious reason to emulate older computers. Many people have fond memories of computer games that ran on their old Ataris, Amigas, Apple IIs, game consoles, and other fun old machines. Today's powerful computers have no problem simulating the hardware and software behavior of these old boxes. Emulator programs such as Bochs, MAME, and others re-create the early days of PCs and video games. The software for these old machines often took less disk space than one graphics-intensive email does today. So, it's no problem having the software for hundreds of games, including old operating systems, on your own disk.

The historical arena is also pretty busy. Today, you can download and run operating systems for the famous computers of the early days of computing, and you can experience what it was like to interact with groundbreaking machines such as the Eniac, the IBM-360, the PDP-11, and even the Altair-8800the first "personal" microcomputer. In fact, I wrote an emulator myself for the IBM 1130, the first computer that I ever got to program. (You just don't know how much to appreciate a Windows workstation unless you've spent some time working with punched cards.)

The operating systems and compilers of many early computers were "open source," that is, they were publicly available, and can legally be copied. And, many manufacturers have made early operating systems available, either through free licensing options, or as public domain releases. There is also the large grey area of abandonware, ancient software whose manufacturers and copyright holders have completely disappeared.

For some links to interesting emulation Web sites, check out http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Emulators, simh.trailing-edge.com, and of course, www.ibm1130.org.