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Running a Minecraft Server and more on a 1960s UNIVAC Computer

241 points by brilee

by chasil

0 subcomment

Research UNIX was ported to the UNIVAC, which (I believe) was the first SMP kernel implementation. It ran on top of the native kernel, known as EXEC-8. A later port to IBM hardware did the same.
"The UNIX system for the UNIVAC 1100 series was built as an integrated development environment for transactions that run directly on EXEC. Unlike most other implementations, therefore, it runs not directly on the hardware but as a collection of user-level activities under control of EXEC. These obtain services that would normally be provided by device drivers, and some process creation and management services from EXEC. Any configuration supplied by Sperry, including multiprocessor ones, can run the UNIX system."
https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/other...

by deweywsu

0 subcomment

WOW! I started off thinking "this could be a boring meandering through registers and op codes" but by the time I got half way through your write-up, I was bouncing off the walls excited. Thanks for sharing your awesome write-up and glad you had such a cool project!

by proxysna

5 subcomments

What a great write up, and a video too! Even though Minecraft stuff ofc was a bit of a bait, it would be interesting see the answer to "Can it run Doom?".

by Dwedit

0 subcomment

"What's My Line" had in-show advertisements for the UNIVAC computer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEQlOrPs6fw

by vaughnegut

1 subcomments

Favourite article I've read in a while, what a delight. I wonder what kind of performance you could get if someone hand wrote a dedicated, modern C compiler for it.

by kaladin-jasnah

1 subcomments

Hah, I heard about this at VCF East this year, but didn't get to check out the exhibit. There was another MC server demo running on old Macs IIRC. Shame the event was cut short due to a bomb threat.

by aftbit

1 subcomments

Does anyone know why the jal RISC-V instruction scrambles it bits in this way?
https://msyksphinz-self.github.io/riscv-isadoc/html/rvi.html...

by caminanteblanco

0 subcomment

Related: https://github.com/TheScienceElf/UNIVAC-1219 https://youtu.be/rU8sCbwB8XU

by mghackerlady

0 subcomment

I watched the video when it came out, I've been a fan of his stuff for a while. It'd been a while since he uploaded and I was rewatching some of his videos the night before this was uploaded!

by invalidSyntax

0 subcomment

"Claude Code can’t write UNIVAC assembly yet" Who knew. It's hard just to look for data on the internet(besides wikipedia).

by petterroea

1 subcomments

Stupid question, would a quick&dirty LLVM backend for univac be possible to write, or are there inherent incompatibilities due to its weird architecture?

by djmips

0 subcomment

I would like to see this code instead compiled native instead of via the RISC-V interpreter.

by dmitrygr

0 subcomment

Give me access to the machine and i'll have linux up on it in a few weeks ;) For real, not just the login prompt

by hassaanr

0 subcomment

Incredibly cool project and fantastic write up!

by anthk

0 subcomment

On '18 bit words'... if you know some experts on the PDP10, these might help you, they already created new software for ITS and Tops20.

by anthk

0 subcomment

Port Scoundrel/Donsol:
https://codeberg.org/luxferre/scoundrel-ports
Rules:
gopher://hoi.st/0/posts/2026-01-05-discovered-new-game.txt

by kls0e

0 subcomment

beautiful, thank you