2.0 KiB
Prime 50-Series Emulator
What Is This?
This is a software emulator for a minicomputer architecture sold by Prime Computer from the early 70s through about 1993. Prime's initial business plan was to make systems compatible with the Honeywell x16 family, which had then-recently been discontinued. Prime extended the architecture heavily.
Emulator History
Beginning in 2005, Jim Wilcoxson developed an emulator for Prime Computer's 50-Series architecture. The emulator originally ran on the PowerPC architecture. In late 2011, Jim ported it so it would run on x86. This entailed solving endianness issues (The 50-Series is big-endian), as well as re-optimizing the code for performanceu without the host processor having a large set of general-purpose registers.
Emulator Documentation
Coming soon, we swear!
Public Systems
There are a set of emulators available for public use. These may
be accessed via telnet to the appropriate port on em.prirun.com.
| PRIMOS Revision | Port |
|---|---|
| 18.3.1 | 8007 |
| 19.2 | 8001 |
| 20.2.8 | 8002 |
| 21.0.6 | 8003 |
| 22.1.4 | 8004 |
| 23.4.Y2K.R1 | 8005 |
| 24.0.0.r15 | 8006 |
For example, telnet em.prirun.com 8001.
Prime History
Some information about the Prime company is available in the FAQ which was assembled by denizens of the comp.sys.prime usenet group and Info-Prime mailing list around the time Prime's 50-Series business unit ceased to exist. A reformatted copy is available here.
Prime Documentation
A growing collection of Prime and related documentation is available at sysovl.info.
Getting PRIMOS
Two versions of PRIMOS are available from Bitsavers:
The Rev. 19 tape is a save from an installed system.