Episode: 2320
Title: HPR2320: Living Computers: Museum + Labs
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2320/hpr2320.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 01:17:39

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This in HPR episode 2,320 entitled Living Computers, Union Plus Labs, it is hosted by
8.0up and in about 16 minutes long and currently in a clean flag, the summer is free shell accounts
on old computers with old programming lines.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com, get 15% discount on all shared
hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15, better web hosting that's honest and fair
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Good day, my name is JWP and I'm here today to talk to you about the Living Computers
Museum and Labs.
It's a computer and technology museum located in the so-do neighborhood of Seattle, Washington.
The LCM plus L showcases vintage computers which provide interactive sessions either through
time sharing, operating systems or single user interfaces.
This gives users a chance to actually use one of the computers online or in person at
the museum.
An expansion of add-on such as direct touch experiences with contemporary technology such as virtual reality
or self-driving cars, Internet of Things and robotics is also available.
This puts today's computer technology in the context of how it's being used to tackle
real-world issues.
LCM plus L also hosts a wide range of educational programs and events in their state of our
classroom and lab spaces.
According to LCM plus L's website, their goal is to breathe back into our machines so the public can
experience what it was like to see them, hear them and interact with them.
Make our systems accessible by allowing people to come and interact with them and by making them accessible over the Internet.
That's what I did.
I went there and I have been a long-time SDF user and SDF is a netBSD thing you'd log into and they connected a
bunch of older systems together.
The next sort of a little network, I have a little website there and do some typing and some
nano there and maintain an email address there and just some basic stuff that you can do with netBSD.
It's really my onlyBSD experience right now with SDF.
They mentioned that one of their older UNIX computers donated to this place and so I was like,
well, you know, what is it?
So they donated their old Bell Labs Western Electric system there and it's a old 32-bit Western Electric
chip and it helped me and it's really slow.
It's only got 16 megabytes of RAM and so you're sort of limited.
What they were using it for was a BBS and the museum kept the BBS portion so you can play like little old fashioned arcade games.
You can request an email but that email isn't anything like a modern email.
It's a more like a use net email off of that system, off of that system.
But what it's really interesting for is it uses the last version of the pure AT&T UNIX.
So if you're learning Linux commands and you don't want to have any BSD variants in there or anything,
the purest that you're going to get is right there on that old AT&T box.
And they also have a whole lot of others.
I've been an OpenVMS fan and the death row of VMS network went offline a couple of years ago.
The beef, I think, switched jobs and they weren't going to let him host those old alpha servers anymore.
So he couldn't maintain the OpenVMS anymore.
But this place has an OpenVMS. So if you want to mess around with OpenVMS a little bit, see what it was like.
And interestingly, you can type in anything you want to do into Google and the HP manuals for VMS will come right up.
And you can type in the commands you want.
So again, it is a museum.
So it's not like really quick to get any kind of support or anything.
But you can request accounts on the systems that you want.
So I requested one on the Western Electric account with AT&T UNIX 5 on it.
And I also requested account on the OpenVMS.
But they have a bunch of other things.
They have some original Apple boxes, an Atari box, a Commodore box, some of the things from Compack.
I've never heard of it.
A Corminco data general.
I already talked about the DEC stuff.
They have some early Dell servers.
Some stuff from IBM.
And I am SAA and inner data.
And they have MITS and Microsoft and NEXT and Osborne processor technology.
Some stuff from RadioShack.
Son, Tandy, TeleType Corporation, Texas Instruments and Xerox.
So all of that is there.
And the ones that they have for via XBidgets right now are the Control Data Corporation,
Digital Equipment, IBM, Vulcan and XKL.
Available through telnet is Digital Equipment Corporation, Xerox.
Something called XKL and Control Data Corporation.
And they are redoing right now a Bindix Corporation computer and a Control Data Corporation computer as well as several IDMs.
So interestingly you can get several programming languages there.
And they have several other systems also available.
And you can play a lot of games there.
So the programming languages, and they are, I mean it's sort of hard sometimes to find them.
So they have the old PDEP systems.
So PDEP is sort of what digital started everything with.
And they use a thing called Marco.
So M-A-C-R-O.
And so that's available for you to use.
They have a language called J-C-L.
And J-C-L is pretty interesting in the fact that it's the job control language.
It's a scripting language and it's used on the mainframe to instruct the system how to run a batch job or start a subsystem.
And there are two distinct IBM job control languages.
And one is the operating system lineage that begins with DOS-360,
whose latest member is Z slash VSE.
And the other is OS-360 or ZOS, the latter using JES extensions for job control language.
And they use the same basic sign-ex rule.
So if you get it, but that's available there at the museum for you to try out and learn.
They have a APL language.
And APL is not to be confused with the address programming language.
The name after the book, a programming language.
So it's a programming language developed in the 60s by Kenneth E. Iverson.
And it's a central data type is the multidimensional array.
It uses a large range of special graphics symbols to represent most functions and operators leading to a very concise code.
And it's been an important influence and development of concept modeling and spreadsheets and functional programming.
And computer packages.
It's also a part of several other languages.
And it's still used today in certain applications.
So that's available.
They have a C.
But it's a very old C.
So it's like a really pure and I want to say anti-C.
But I don't know if it's a anti-C or not.
You know, anti-C is made by the standard agency.
But C is really the letter C.
And it's a general purpose in our operative computer programming language.
Supporting structured programming and
lexical variable scope and recursion.
While a static type system prevents many unattended operations, by design C,
construction map of efficiently to type typical machine instructions.
Therefore, it has found the lasting use and applications that had formerly been coded and coded in assembly language,
including operating systems as well as various application software for computers ranging from supercomputers to embedded.
Of course, C was developed by Dennis Richie between 16 on and 73 at Bell Labs.
And it's used to re-implement unix operating systems.
It has since become one of the most widely used programming languages of all time.
With C compiler, some various vendors available in the majority of existing computer architectures and operating systems.
C has been standardized by the American National Standards Institute ANSI since 1989.
C ANSI C and is subsequently by the International Standards Organization ISO.
So if you're looking for a C compiler, you can find it at the museum and you can start programming there with one of the online accounts.
They have Lisp, Basic, Coball, Fortran.
So all of those are pretty old.
I mean, I know that in Germany, there's a lot of demand for if you know Coball right now that you can get a job.
And you could learn it right there for free at the museum web page.
They have something called SH. And I'm not extremely familiar with SH.
But it comes up when you, it's a Born Shell.
And they call it a computer language or something.
And the Born Shell is on everything.
So Born Shell was the default version for version seven unix.
And like most systems, they continue to have a bin slash SH will be the Born Shell.
And so that's really what it is.
So it's a shell or command line infrastructure for computer operating systems.
And I don't know why they put that in an operating system.
And then the last thing, I mean, Dave Morris will love this because they're taught they have OCC or AWK.
And for those of you that don't know Dave, Dave did an interesting talk with about the AWK language.
So AWK is a programming language designed for text processing and typically used as a data extraction reporting tool.
And so you can do a lot of stuff with that.
And Dave has done a several podcasts on HPR about the AWK programming language.
And so that's available there.
Notably missing is Java or anything normal.
Okay. And so the list of operating systems is tops 10, tops 20, open VMS, your next version seven, CP minus V.
I don't know what CP minus V is. So we'll have a look.
The CP minus V is it's based on the universal time sharing system.
So CP minus V is pronounced CP 5 operating system.
It's successor to UTS, which is released in August of 73.
CPV supported the same CPU as UTS plus the Xerox.
So it's a Xerox 560.
CPV offered a single stream and multi-program model batch.
So that's so it's it's off the Xerox machine that they have.
And so they have Unix SRVR3, BSD43 and NOS 1.3.
I don't know what NOS says.
We'll go through that same process again.
So NOS is a network operating system used with time sharing capabilities and it was written by a control data corporation in the 1970s.
So that goes with the control data guys.
So they have a lot of games that you can play there.
And a lot of games that you can play there.
Now what I don't know is if all of them are on the they have an Xbox One.
So I think these are most of these are at the at the bank.
So you can play all the old Atari games the TI 99.
I can't have thought about a TI 99 in a long time.
TSR 80, the Atari 400, the Osborne Executive, the Commodore 64, the Apple II, the Amiga 500, the Atari 10.
I used to own one of these, a 1040 ST.
I had the best keyboard, any computer I ever owned.
And so that's really it.
They seem to be doing quite well.
Paul Allen gave them some money on 2006 and he was able to start that.
And so that's why they have all these great, great old computers.
And I was really glad that that old AT&T box didn't get thrown away after STF didn't need it anymore.
All right, well this is JWP and I'm reachable at JWP5 at homel.com.
Please drop me a note if you need anything.
You'll have a great fantastic day.
I hope your moral day was absolutely fantastic.
And we'll talk to you next time.
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