Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jbdigriz990 1603 days ago
Good a time as any to ask if anyone has come across the sources for the OS. Bob Supnik has been looking for it a long time for simh. The story is it disappeared at some point into the bowels of the company that took over the service contracts for these machines. Possibly Indian. Anyone know for sure or have any contacts?
3 comments
tralarpa 1603 days ago
> if anyone has come across the sources for the OS

Wouldn't that be this one?

http://www.phkimpel.us/B5500/webSite/SoftwareRequest.html

link
jbdigriz990 1602 days ago
Looks like it. I guess my info was a little stale. Thanks for the link!
link
rbanffy 1602 days ago
I remember at CCE (consumer electronics company in Brazil) they had an A-6 with hot failover to a bank’s A-10 across the street. It was pretty normal to see the MCP guru reading the source code for the OS (in ALGOL).
link
pjmlp 1603 days ago
Given that Burroughs OSes are still being sold as part of Unisys ClearPath MCP (naturally not 1:1 with 1960's), I doubt Unisys would be that happy.
link
Cullinet 1603 days ago
"Burroughs software was designed to run only on proprietary hardware. For this reason, Burroughs was free to distribute the source code of all software it sold, including the MCP, which was designed with this openness in mind. "

so it should be around :

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_MCP

link
rbanffy 1602 days ago
Should we really try to run Tron’s villain?

It’s no coincidence Alan Kay, Bonnie McBird’s husband, was working at Unisys when she wrote the script.

link
rbanffy 1602 days ago
You can download an official emulator from their website. It’s proprietary and runs on Windows, and you have to sign a license promising you’ll only use it for development.

But I have to warn you: It is one of the most user hostile OSs I’ve have ever seen.

If anyone thinks vi or Emacs are hard, they should play with CANDE.

link
pjmlp 1602 days ago
Part of the technical school tranship was on OS/400 state of the art in early 1990's doing system backups to tapes, I also did my typing exam for computing in PCs running MS-DOS 3.3 with edlin, I think CANDE is manageable. :)
link
rbanffy 1600 days ago
> I think CANDE is manageable.

CANDE is not software you use. It's software you fight and submit to your will. It's a bit like Emacs, but made by people with 4-digit IQs, for people with 4-digit IQs.

link
nigwil_ 1602 days ago
Unisys has been very supportive of our efforts to find and preserve early Burroughs software and generously provided corporate time to arrange licensing and provide copies of anything they still had. Burroughs B5000 series now has a rich library of software and several emulator implementations (web-browser, simh and standalone). However the B6000/7000 family software recovery is sparse with critical pieces still missing, we are unable to bootstrap a working MCP as yet.
link
pjmlp 1602 days ago
Nice to know, navigating the site to get stuff like the latest NEWP manuals, the new Web interface and other similar stuff, seems to have moved into "talk to sales" kind of stuff, so hence why I was wondering that.

Good that they are helping then.

link
gjvc 1603 days ago
No idea, but you might find someone who could help via a google search for ...b5000 emulator burroughs...
link