Off-topic but I used to do security assessments and had a bunch of small banks for customers. One of them was still running the banking software they had when they first got computerized and it ran on an HP3000 from the 70s. Over the years reliable hardware became impossible to find, so they bought some emulator software and ran it on Windows. I don't know why but it always made me chuckle.

That thing did *not* like port scans. (I warned 'em! :D)

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bitwize 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

The Swiss Military Museum maintains an exhibit with a 1970s tank simulator that guests can try out. It consists of a tank cockpit in a hydraulically mounted chamber that can pitch and roll with the changing terrain. The operator drives a little camera around a large diorama providing a first-person view of simulated terrain; a "foot" on the camera senses the terrain which is then translated into movements of the chamber. Apparently all of the equipment is original except the computer; as computer parts became harder to replace, eventually they just used a Raspberry Pi.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQifPHcMLE

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iberator 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Interesting fact: hp3000 is an example of very few mainframe/mini computers based on stack architecture instead of registers:)

I'm currently writing assembler for my own virtual cpu hehe. Stack based of course

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tdeck 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I think the Burroughs machines also had a stack-based architecture

https://www.hoa.org/blog/jack-allweiss/evolution-of-burrough...

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arethuza 4 days ago | parent [-]

I had to use a Burroughs mainframe for development during the first year of my CS course in 1983 - might have been interesting hardware but the user experience was ghastly - some awful thing called CANDE = although I did get a laugh out of all of the references to the MCP.

In retrospect I do wonder if they did that so that when we moved to Unix machines later in the course we'd really appreciate them!

	▲	satiated_grue 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		MCP is still available from Unisys, which was formed by the "merger" of Burroughs and Sperry Univac. It was first released in 1961 - is there any other software, particularly an OS, still in production after that long? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_MCP

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nathan_douglas 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I did a similar project as an independent study for my CS degree. It was a ton of fun! I haven't tried it but I think you can then write a Forth for it very simply too.

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hn92726819 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> That thing did not like port scans

What do you mean? As a security feature or would it crash or something if you port scanned it?

	▲	jcims 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		It immediately froze up.