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  • General Turtle TT2500

    From Lars Brinkhoff@21:1/5 to All on Fri Oct 2 06:17:32 2020
    Hello,

    I'm writing a simulator for the General Turtle TT2500. I have various
    informal descriptions, an assembler, and some software. If anyone has
    any information, or photos, etc, I'd love to see it.

    The processor is a custom TTL design with some pipeline hazards exposed.
    There are two displays: one for text and another for vector graphics.
    There is an UART and a keyboard. The software accepts input from the
    UART; text with Datapoint cursor codes goes to the text display, and
    turtle graphis commands (including SPIN and GROW) to the vector display.

    Best regards,
    Lars Brinkhoff

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  • From Lars Brinkhoff@21:1/5 to All on Sun Nov 8 11:49:56 2020
    The simulator now works. Here is a short demo running the original
    microcode written by Danny Hillis. The simulator is attached to a
    PDP-10 emulator running ITS. A Maclisp program was used to send turtle commands.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MM-sItpgaQ

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  • From Jecel@21:1/5 to All on Mon Dec 28 11:01:24 2020
    Lars,

    great job! This is an important step in preserving an obscure, but valuable, part of our computing history. How did you get the microcode and software and other details to implement this?

    -- Jecel

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  • From Lars Brinkhoff@21:1/5 to Jecel on Wed Apr 21 10:39:32 2021
    Jecel wrote:
    great job! This is an important step in preserving an obscure, but
    valuable, part of our computing history. How did you get the microcode
    and software and other details to implement this?

    I have access to MIT's archive of PDP-10 backup tapes. There I found
    Minsky's hardware description with all details to implement the
    emulator, and Hillis' microcode source and binaries.

    Some of those files are trickling out at a slow pace. These
    are published with permission from Hillis. https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/tt2500-raw-data

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