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Amazing updates from a variety of sources

The winter has been very busy, unseasonably cold and lots of snow in Canada. The winter used to be like this all the time, but we have forgotten! So much has happened in the first 8 weeks of the year. Tremendous news below! First, the Museum of Science and Technology wants to include the simulator in their permanent collection of artifacts. This would include hosting the simulator in such a way that the public can download it and try it out. I am beyond ecstatic with this development. It will require some more work .. some usage manuals and training videos, but the results will be well worth the effort. The timing is flexible, but I am hoping that we can complete the work this calendar year. In other news, I reached out on Facebook to a page dedicated to my old high school Eastview from the 70s. I posted some information about the project and mentioned that I was trying to reach Tim Crawford, if he was still alive. Tim organized the donation of the computer to the Museum, but was there...
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The Student Computer Operator

After Eastview Seondary School in Barrie acquired its GE-115 computer in the summer of 1969, it also acquired an operational problem. Unlike today's computers, this computer did not run itself.  The computer processed individual submissions, one at a time. A student learning to program would prepare their card deck on one of the two IBM 026 manual card punch machines, wrap an elastic band around the deck and add it to the stack of jobs to be run in the metal rack just outside the computer room door. Then, the computer operator had to take that job, put it into the card reader, and process it through the GE-115. Then, the operator would take the resulting printouts and wrap it around the card deck, add an elastic band (we must have gone through a ton of elastic bands!) and return the completed job to the rack. Then, the learner would then have the opportunity to read through their printout, try to figure out what went wrong, fix the problem and re-submit. The turnaround time for thi...
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The Museum Problem

After we had reviewed the artifacts, Cédric talked to me about the role of the museum in preserving and interpreting history. All of the many, many artifacts they have are historically significant. The question is, how do you show this to people who are new to the old technology? To put a computer on the floor in the museum is easy, but after people have exhausted their curiosity about the size of the old thing and the various different kinds of switches, knobs and wires on it, how can the museum help the patrons to understand what this computer was all about back in the day. I am going to call this the "museum problem". I'm sure that it has a better name amongst curators, but this label works for me. I now think of my work in creating an emulator and collating architecture information as part of solving the museum problem. Everything I have done so far, I did for fun and nostalgia. Now, I have a greater sense of purpose. Cédric told me that one way to enhance the patron...
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National Museum of Science and Technology

Last week, I visited the National Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa. I had not been there since I was in public school so many years ago. There is an exhibit called the crazy kitchen, which is a room built in strange angles vertically and horizontally and with interesting perspectives. It challenges your sense of perspective and balance. I remember that room from 50 years ago. Go see it if you never have! The Museum is the final resting place for the GE-115 computer from my high school. In 1980, the computer was donated. It was dismantled, crated and shipped and has been sitting in the warehouse ever since. I should mention that the warehouse is a massive storage facility which houses all kinds of technologies, including trains and automobiles! I met with Cédric, who is part of the team of curators in communication technology. He kindly arranged to show me some of the artifacts that were both meaningful and easily accessible. In our earlier discussions, we agreed that it did n...
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So much has happened

 It has been a while since I posted. Such is life! This fall I have been poking around with the simulator, adding new features and testing old ones to make sure they still worked. In the meanwhile, some really interesting developments happened. The Computer History Museum digitized two new manuals for the GE-115: The GE-115 Users Guide Reference Manual and Programming the GE-115. I am immensely grateful to everyone at CHM for making this happen. These manuals had a tremendous amount of information in them. The Systems Manual (1965) had a more explicit definition of the APS assembly language, including assembler directives and storage declarations. This manual also clarified some information about binary and decimal arithmetic, particularly around how calculations proceeded when the operands are of different length. It took about a month to fix the simulator up to the point of accurately reflecting the new reality outlined in the Systems Manual. There were a number of interesting re...
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Version 2 ready to go

 All of the changes (ie. correction of mistakes) identified in the GE-115 System Manual have been made.  The biggest challenge was to switch the conditional jumps, which use a mask of complementary conditions, to a mapping from two status bits, zero and overflow. There is a nice way to do this by mapping the four status combinations from two bits into 4 different mask values. I retested my test programs, and had to make a few changes, sometimes to the test program (due to an improved understanding of what was supposed to happen) and sometimes to correct errors in the simulator which came to light. All in all, the transition was pretty smooth. So the new simulator, assembler and Fortran compiler are ready to go out to be tested in a larger context. I have started work on a website which will allow people to request instructions for downloading the simulator. I am thinking an FTP transfer might be the most efficient way to distribute for now.  With the website, I am thinkin...
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Revelations from California

What an exciting development! On Friday, I was able to download the GE-115 System Manual which had been digitized at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. What an amazing document!!! There is a link at the end of this post so that you can read it yourself. First, I want to express my thanks to Penny and her colleagues at CHM. They are doing great work preserving important aspects of computer history. Without them, this manual and many others would have ended up in a landfill instead of a knowledge-fill. Kudos to everyone! Here is a link to their site: Computer History Museum My experience of reading this manual was first a sense of deja vu. I had first read this manual, published in 1966, in about 1970. I had poured over it, trying to take in all the detail as I tried to learn how to tame the beast and bend it to my will. (A little overly dramatic there, sorry about that, but that's what it felt like). The nuances of why things worked one way and not another. I ...
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