Whirlwind I

en.wikipedia.org

18 points·keepamovin··3 comments

Very cool!

And of course (?) this being the Internets and me getting the silly idea to look into writing an assembler and/or emulator for it just for fun, that's already been done [1] and years ago. Nice! <3

There are more projects, this one is just the first in my list of search results.

[1]: https://github.com/aap/whirlwind

[2]: https://github.com/aap/whirlwind/blob/master/f.s

Yes, hello there! That was my first whirlwind emulator. The current and third iteration is a very low level one for which I reconstructed the control matrix from around 1954. You can find the code here: https://github.com/aap/blincolnlights/tree/master/whirlwind Unfortunately it currently doesn't run without the little frontpanel i built (blincolnlights 18), but with just a little work that should not be a problem. The only IO device is currently the point plotting display.

The other person interested in Whirlwind I is Guy Fedorkow and his emulator is here: https://github.com/gfedorkow/Whirlwind-Instruction-Simulator...

Whirlwind I is an absolutely cool and lovely machine. I always call it the first microcontroller (not very micro though, took up a whole building).

The (in nerd culture) famous Austrian pendant from Heinz Zemanek at the Vienna University of Technology was called "Mailüfterl" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail%C3%BCfterl) which is translated something like "gentle breeze in may".

Zemanek said all of those 'powerful' US machines had stormy names, so he had to name it accordingly :]

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