IBM 5110 Emulator in JavaScript (2015) | Hacker News Reader

IBM 5110 Emulator in JavaScript (2015)

norbertkehrer.github.io

Now John Titdor can use the emulator instead of the actual machine.

Wasn’t he looking for the IBM 5100, which is partially incompatible with the 5110?

He is looking for the 5100 because it had an easter egg in it in the form of an IBM360 assembler development environment in ROM. I'm guessing they never publicized this feature because they didn't want it to cut into the sales of their larger computers. Only IBM technicians who needed a mobile development environment knew about this.

Or, this is him telling us that JavaScript will save the world afterall.

While cleaning up my basement I found a box of 8" disks. These date back to when I had 2 5110s running in my living room one year. I wrote AR software for a liquor distribution company. They heated the whole house when I had both running at the same time. I wrote miles of code that winter. This was long before while loops and I had lots of GOTOs in the code.

(no, I'm not the seller)

https://www.ebay.com/itm/223483556245?hash=item3408a87195:g:...

I’ll just let my friends here know my birthday is in March…

For four grand, I would at very least want the APL version of the machine :)

I’m curious why, at $4k, the shipping isn’t included. Sure, it’s heavy and costs a lot to ship, but there’s something psychological about “free shipping” even if the price is higher (case in point: Amazon)

Just out of curiosity I would like to know if this is a emulator written in JavaScript or written in C and compiled with Emscripted for the web. I have not found information in the linked source. Anyone knows?

The linked page about the emulator[0] says it’s a port and has some bugs that the original doesn’t have. That’d lead me to believe it’s a rewrite rather than a cross-compile.

[0]: https://norbertkehrer.github.io/ibm5110_js.html

That's really cool. Could use a "paste" button though, especially for APL code, which has a lot of characters that are hard to remember how to generate from a keyboard :)

Now when is someone going to write a javascript emulator for the IBM 5110 :)

Only semi-serious too, I don't see many future tech ported backwards often, which I think is more interesting.

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