91bddd02c3
system to operate as a HASP station in an RJE environment. This implementation is compatible with Bisync/HASP emulation in the Hercules IBM mainframe emulator and the DtCyber CDC mainframe emulator.
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 performance 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. A howto on installing PRIMOS in the emulator is here. Discussion of adapting these instructions to 22.1.4 has been occurring on the cctalk mailing list.
Getting PRIMOS
Two versions of PRIMOS are available from Bitsavers:
- Rev 22.1.4 [has issues]
- Rev 22.1.4 repacked [use this]
- Rev 19.?
The Rev. 19 tape is a save from an installed system.
Sample System Images
A set of sample system images derived from the public emulators can
be downloaded to get you started. The
tarball
is 142882727 bytes, and its sha256sum is
32647dbcc3a0d541209eafc2f78d054e456d58046c9b3c5bc4ca64a8d9fc0037.
(gzip compression would only reduce this by ~400 kilobytes.)
V3 removes additional junk, and rebuilds the disk images as 600 MB
drives, split 30/10 heads filesystem/paging. This tarball preserves
sparse allocation ("holes"), so that uninitialized space in the disk
images does not occupy actual space. You may need to tell tar to
preserve this sparse allocation when you extract, e.g. with the -S
option. Also includes enhancements to the wrapper scripts: directory
independence and the ability to run the runem script from a terminal.