Burroughs B5500 emulator | Hacker News Reader

Burroughs B5500 emulator

phkimpel.us

61 pointsfanf214 comments

The system that was immune to many forms of code injection at hardware level with OS written in a high-level language way before we learned both of those were great for building reliable, secure systems.

http://www.smecc.org/The%20Architecture%20%20of%20the%20Burr...

The modern hardware that followed in its footsteps the most was SAFE architecture now being commercialized as Coreguard. Originally, it protected the primitive operations like in Burroughs. They found a more flexible mechanism that supports many "micro-policies." Dover has it available several RISC CPU's. SoC builders take note! :)

http://www.crash-safe.org/papers.html

https://dovermicrosystems.com/coreguard/

This is a long shot but I was wondering if anyone on this site might have worked on or been familiar with Burroughs Corp from 1960-1961.

My maternal grandfather (Alan Bernard Gerlach) worked at Burroughs for that time. He co-authored a patent with Edward Glaser just prior to his death in January of 1962 (age 32). I've tried contacting Unisys (the merged company of Burroughs and Sperry Corp) but unfortunately they no longer have records from that time period.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US3275989A/en?oq=US-327598...

If anyone has photos, information or documentation about him I'd be very appreciative if you could share it.

Try using HN search to find old comments about Burroughs. It's possible, if you find some, that we could put you in touch with the commenter. In that case email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll be happy to help.

Have noted the reference, will see what we can find.

if you fill out your hackernews bio/profile with contact details we can follow-up with you.

And for those of you who (like me) have no idea what a Burroughs B5500 was:

http://www.retrocomputingtasmania.com/home/projects/burrough...

Famous computer scientists worked at Burroughs. Among them Knuth and Dijkstra.

Wirth also worked _with_ the 5500, but I don't think he ever worked for Burroughs.

SIMH has a B5500 emulator now as well. I'm not sure if it's the same codebase as this one.

https://github.com/simh/simh

No: Paul Kimpel's emulator is written in Javascript, and runs in the browser (complete with control panel displays).

Great to see.

But, opening lots of separate browser windows for the different components (card reader, magnetic tape, line printer, etc) is (IMHO) poor UX. Web apps should do everything in one browser window/tab, and use DIVs (or whatever) within that window/tab to implement different UI elements, rather than seven separate popup windows.

Note : Gary Kildall of CPM fame, wrote an implementation of the programming language APL for the B5500 while he was a student at University of Washington. You may be able to find his technical report on this online.

Here's the source code, via Paul Kimpel:

https://github.com/retro-software/B5500-software/tree/master...

It was still in my browser history, https://dada.cs.washington.edu/research/tr//1970/09/UW-CSE-7...

For those who don't know, that system is still alive: https://www.unisys.com/offerings/clearpath-forward/clearpath...

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