Update Wiki

Every once in a while Update's members and friends come together for a cozy little conference to talk about their computer-related projects.

• When: July 16th 2022, 13:00–18:00 (plus vintage computing hackathon on July 17th 2022)
• Where: Svartbäcksgatan 65, Uppsala. Please sign up if you plan to attend on-site! Online participation via BigBlueButton.

Saturday, July 16th

• 13:00 – The Large Scale Systems Museum and the Scientific Data Systems 940
  Mark Kahrs (University of Pittsburgh)
  Two talks in one! In the first part, the hardware and software of the Large Scale Systems Museum will be reviewed. Operational status, as well as future plans, will be described. In the second part, the SDS-940 will be briefly described followed by a discussion of two different attempts to reconstitute software on this influential but extinct hardware.
• 13:45 – E FAIL SAIL WAITS
  Lars Brinkhoff (Ictech)
  A demonstration of the Stanford AI lab operating system called WAITS, running on a PDP-10 emulator with support for the Data Disc raster display system. The E editor will be used to live-code two small “hello world” programs for the FAIL assembler and SAIL compiler.
• 14:30 – Break
• 14:45 – Creating Chaos in modern computers
  Björn Victor (Update)
  I will present my work on implementing the Chaosnet network protocol in modern computers. Chaosnet was previously only available on old emulated systems. The implementation, through a Network Control Program in the Chaosnet bridge program, will be described, and its operation interactively demonstrated, including interoperability with e.g. ITS. Also, some ongoing work will be discussed.
• 15:30 – Break
• 16:00 – Multics
  Angelo Papenhoff (Humboldt University of Berlin)
  Multics is an operating system perhaps best known for engendering Unix, but not many have actually used it or know much about it. In my talk I want to present how it was developed, what kind of hardware it ran on, explain some of its central ideas, show how these actually look like in practice in an interactive session, and summarize to what degree its ideas are still around today.
• 17:30 – Guided tour of Update's new premises, with an overview of ongoing and future projects

Sunday, July 17th, Svartbäcksgatan 65

• 14:00–18:00: Vintage computing hackathon
  • Multics programming session
  • Hacking on a PDP-11/10, Update's computer of the month July 2022
  • Your project?

• When: May 4th 2019, 14:00–18:00
• Where: Uppsala University, ITC 1111

• 14:00 – Opening
• 14:15 – Restoring global chaos – communications interoperability of an ancient network protocol
  Björn Victor (Uppsala University)
  I will describe and demonstrate Chaosnet, a networking protocol developed for Lisp machines and ITS at MIT around 1975, and how its various link-layer implementations for emulated and physical systems (e.g. Symbolics 3600, CADR/usim, Lambda/ld, PDP-10/klh10, VAX/simh) were integrated by developing a “bridge” program which interconnects them. Chaosnet packets can currently be transported over Ethernet, IP, UDP, TLS and named Unix sockets. This has allowed the creation of a “global Chaosnet” which currently has 15-20 nodes. Its main hub is at Update.
• 15:15 – A short history of end-user programming
  Herbert Lange (University of Gothenburg)
  It is not always possible to draw a clear line between software developers and end users. There can be situations where end users create programs on their own, which can be called “end-user programming” (sv. “anveckling”). Common examples are spreadsheets where advanced users can develop elaborate code to perform relevant tasks, or macro languages. Furthermore, methods have been developed to help potentially untrained users to perform programming tasks like natural programming and visual programming. This talk puts a spotlight on several historic highlights where users are empowered to contribute their own ideas to the software they are using.
• 15:45 – Break
• 16:15 – A whirlwind tour through PDPs
  Angelo Papenhoff (Humboldt University of Berlin)
  This talk will give an overview of DEC's early PDPs (1, 4, 5, 6) and their spiritual predecessors, the TX-0 and Whirlwind I. The focus will be on the instruction set and hardware organization of these machines, with some notes on the historical context and the technology that was used to build them.
• 17:00 – Get to know the PDP-8 through emulation
  Pontus Pihlgren (Update)
  The PDP-8 suitably has eight instructions. In this talk we will work through the core instruction set and describe them in terms of emulation. The end result is a working emulator in less than 1000 lines of C code.
• 18:00 – Guided tour of Update's premises, including server room and storage.

The first Update mini-conference took place on July 15th 2018. With participants from Sweden, Germany and the USA it was a great success.

• 15:00 – The beginnings of 36-bit computing at DEC: Angelo Papenhoff from Humboldt University Berlin talks about the development of the PDP-6 computer and its instruction set and demonstrates some PDP-6 code. Hopefully we'll hear some about the PDP-10 as well.
• 16:00 – ITS - History, development and restoration: Lars Brinkhoff from Ictech in Gothenburg talks about the operating system ITS, which was used on the PDP-10 computers 1967–1990 and inspired many other operating systems and free software. We'll hear about its history and see some applications.
• 17:00 – CADDR – The third coming: Alfred Szmidt, Update member and software engineer in Uppsala, leads a Q&A session about CADR (the second generation MIT Lisp machine) and the LM-3 project, “resurrecting the MIT CADR”. cancelled
• 17:00 – Guided tour of Update's premises, including server room and storage.

• The beginnings of 36-bit computing at DEC (Slides)
• ITS - History, development and restoration (Slides)

The recordings were taken by Stephen Jones from the Living Computer Museum in Seattle.