fentonc

We successfully recovered it, actually (although it turns out we couldn't find enough software for it to be interesting). My cray-buddy Andras has a great write-up on all of the work he's done on software recovery and writing a C++ simulator of all of this stuff: https://www.modularcircuits.com/blog/articles/the-cray-files...

I really need to make an updated blog post about it, but this project evolved into a reasonably-well-debugged Cray J90 core that fits quite comfortably in a Xilinx Artix-7 35T board (I made a somewhat bulky Cray J90 Smartwatch that tells time by running a real-time n-body simulation of Jupiter and 63 of its moons . . . inferring the current time is left as an exercise for the viewer).

It did! I actually got a nice reply from Whitfield Diffie, basically saying "Haha, no." They have what amounts to a never-declassify-anything-digital policy. I got a similar letter from the NNSA.

Through a friend-of-a-friend, I did actually manage to get a copy of the source code to CTSS, the cray time sharing system, on microfiche from Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and I even had it digitized (but not OCR'd), but it's written in a language called COMPASS i've never found a compiler for.

This really has been posted here a lot - Well, for those following along at home, this story actually got a relatively recent update - as of this spring, the 1/10-scale Cray-1A is now residing next to its bigger self in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View!

The curling broom was definitely one of the hardest projects I've ever worked on. The electronics are pretty trivial, but my fabrication skills just weren't up to the challenge - serious curlers can apply a crazy amount of force to the head of a broom when they're playing.

This project was both super fun to build and surprisingly fun to play. It had been on my project “to-do” list for a really long time, and it was one of those rare projects that turned out better than expected. It even held up to a night of drunken party-goers playing it!

We levy plenty of tariffs on goods from other countries to protect local industries - on average ours are very slightly lower than places like the EU, but it’s like ~2.5% vs 3%, not 0% vs 30%, which seems to be your claim.

You forgot the buffer for the attribute ram, which is needed because otherwise you can only set 7 out of every 8 pixels in a block (you have to set the ‘inverse video’ bit to access all 256 possible combos) =)

Did someone summon me?

Website design is not a strength of mine =) Most of my random projects just get their own page on my site whenever I get around to doing a write-up.

Chris Fenton here - someone did actually send me an 80MB 'disk pack' with software, and I was able to modify a super old disk drive to actually read it:

http://www.chrisfenton.com/cray-1-digital-archeology/

And thanks to some awesome help from others, I was able to actually recover a copy of COS (Cray OS):

http://www.chrisfenton.com/cos-recovery/

Andras Tantos and I have been collaborating on this together for a while now, and he actually has a downloadable Cray X-MP datacenter simulator he wrote, where you can run the COS image I found:

http://www.modularcircuits.com/blog/articles/the-cray-files/