The PDP-8 was hardware replicated many times. In the '80s it was a common final year project. There's a classic textbook that works through designing and implementing a clone of the PDP-8/I [1]. I've run into a number of threads over the years where hobbyists have done it with TTL to varying degrees of completeness.
The Apollo Guidance Computer was recreated by a hobbyist from the original designs using a modern logic family but gate-equivalent -- and I can't find it online anymore! Anyone know?
You can still build an original Apple II. [2] Being from the late 1970s there was no custom logic; it's straight TTL plus a 6502, and all the chips are still in production except for the ROMs and DRAM, which are easy enough to work around or find used.
Art of Digital Design: An Introduction to Top-Down Design - Prosser & Winkel, I took their graduate class in 1990 at IU Bloomington.
In this class I & my lab partner designed and built a PDP-8 out of PALs on a wire wrapped board. And we loaded code from old paper tape sources as part of the testing. It was a fun class :)
replica / new hardware that looks the same, with lights and buttons. Behind the panel is (from the one I looked at) an Arduino running an emulator. Don't know if the blinking lights respond the same or if the hardware switches, ports, etc work.
Well, I mean you'd have to ask that regarding: Java, C#, Rust, Go, and so many other languages, they are all younger. Why create those when Pike, C and Perl was already around?
I think it's important to point out that MUDs were probably the first complicated interactive synchronous "Internet applications", even though they were (primarily) textually driven and not "serious" (they were to us). So things like Pike (née-LPC) & moo were on the forefront here on how to author those kind of dynamic systems.
Early web sites, gopher, etc were just request/response mostly static content (sometimes with a dash of a database). They weren't synchronous or "live" in any real way. Things like IRC were synchronous but did not do programmable/dynamic content.
I cut my teeth on moo, and was bored & annoyed to tears writing cgi scripts in Python & Perl and the web didn't catch up to produce really interactive stuff until well over 10 years later ("web 2.0")
In 1994 there was very little competition in scripting and LPC/Pike/moo and the like cribbed ideas that are still not mainstream or became mainstream much later. It's the same year Python got to 1.0 and they didn't get real traction until 2005-2010 sometime.
At the time the alternatives were stuff like Tcl and Awk and Perl 5, which were relatively clunky, incompetent or slower. Perl won for web, though Pike had Roxen and could have, and if that had happened we would likely have gotten a more Smalltalk-like Internet than the PHP Internet we got.
Pike is fun, it will likely compile just fine on your odd computers if you have any and it has some characteristics that are uncommon like easy hot upgrades for long lived systems and modules as data.
You realize that you're on a site that is mainly for programmers, right? Programmers are often interested in languages, for the same reason that woodworkers are often interested in wood - even a kind of wood that they may never use.
Have folks ever tired to even communicate with the devs? They are the most toxic group of individuals that I have ever encountered. Saying that they act like children is insulting to little kids.
History mainly. Lotus Notes/Domino in the 90s was way ahead of its time and pioneered many technologies that would become mainstream only a decade plus later.
they sits on that legacy IP as if anybody cared, i was in the hobbyist program and they screwed it. I was able to download and setup all their products, and now i cant do even that, the only option is to re-download and re-setup an VM image every 6 month or so.
really "user friendly". and then they're wining that nobody contributes to the opensource for VMS.
At some point I was contacted to do a VMS port of Go, for the new x86 port (I have written the Go ports for arm64, sparc64, and for Solaris). In the end it all fizzled out because they couldn't arrange for some sort of license for me such that I would actually be able to run VMS.
Sounds like a company that has enough high paying legacy clients that they still offer a bit of support, but want that free open source work without improving it to make that work easier to complete.
>Despite our initial aspirations for robust community engagement, the reality has fallen short of our expectations. The level of participation in activities such as contributing open-source software, creating wiki articles, and providing assistance on forums has not matched the scale of the program.
>really "user friendly". and then they're wining that nobody contributes to the opensource for VMS.
Yep, one of the first versions of the x86 version one could download everything and it was planed to renew the license once a year. They then canceled the the license after only one year to provide a new image every year (as if i want to reconfigure my system every year).
