Today, with much help from Dennis Boone, I'm releasing the Prime emulator source code on GitHub for non-commercial use. This is the full version of the emulator running on Linux and supports:

- all Prime CPU modes: 16S, 32S, 32R, 64R, 64V, 32I
- all Prime models, from the P400 to P6550
- up to 512MB of memory, depending on the Primos rev and CPU
- a system console
- 128 incoming telnet terminal connections
- 8 disk controllers, 8 drives each
- support for all 25 disk drives sold by Prime
- a tape controller, 4 drives, using the .TAP format
- a PNC controller emulating RingNet over TCP/IP
- a bypass for Primos system serial number checks
- Unix utilities to read/write physical tapes & Magsav tapes

Dennis owns the emulator GitHub repo and has also kindly agreed to take over hosting of the public Prime emulators that have been online since 2008. There are 7 public emulators running in a virtual Prime ring, allowing both remote terminal sessions (
netlink) and remote disk access via PrimeNet. The Prime emulator on Linux is currently running 45-55 Prime MIPS in 64V mode.

A wide range of Prime software is loaded on the public emulators:

- ftn screaming fast Prime Fortran 66 compiler, written in assembler
- f77 the not-so-screaming but full-featured Fortran '77
- pl1g the PL/I Subset G compiler
- pl1 the full PL/I compiler
- plp the original Prime systems language (like PL/I)
- spl the 2nd generation Prime systems language
- cc the C compiler written by Garth Conby of Pacer Software
- pascal the Pascal compiler
- modula Wirth's successor to Pascal
- dbg Prime's source level debugger rivaling modern debuggers
- pma the Prime assembler
- basicv the Prime BASIC compiler
- cobol the original Prime COBOL compiler
- cbl the Prime COBOL '74 compiler
- emacs the full screen editor still used by many today (me!)
- midas the Prime indexed sequential file software

This week we are working on releasing Prime disk images for all of the public emulators to make it easy for others to get their own Prime up and running. For the truly adventurous who want to bootstrap their own Prime system, there are links in the
emulator readme to Prime tape images at Bitsavers and to a large library of Prime manuals.

I learned more about operating systems, compilers, concurrency, and other systems programming topics by reading Prime source code, making changes to Primos, and fiddling with Prime hardware, than I did from all of my college degree work. I loved Prime
computers, Prime software, Prime hardware, and the Prime Computer company, and am grateful to all of the former Prime engineers that provided this robust and interesting hardware and software platform.

I hope you enjoy it too! https://github.com/prirun

Jim

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On 3/11/20 8:34 AM, Jim Wilcoxson wrote:

Today, with much help from Dennis Boone, I'm releasing the Prime emulator source code on GitHub for non-commercial use.

thank you!

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For those interested in playing with Jim's emulator, a few resources:

Bitsavers has some doco and bits:

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/prime/
http://bitsavers.org/bits/Prime/

I have been assembling what I hope will be the definitive Prime info
site. It's not complete, but contains manuals scanned by, among
others, AEK and Jim Wilcoxson, as well as material from my Prime-using
past, etc. I have more documentation and software to add as I have
time.

https://sysovl.info/reference_prime.html

Of particular use might be this writeup on installing PRIMOS Revs 22 or
23 on the emulator. It's set up for the old demo version of the
emulator, so needs a fair amount of updating, but may help get you
started. I'll work on it soonish.

https://sysovl.info/reference_prime_drb_installing_primos.html

De

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A set of sample system images derived from the public emulators can be downloaded from https://yagi.h-net.org/p50em_samplemachines.tar.gz to
get you started. The tarball is 309078820 bytes, and its sha256sum is 8fe261f7a9f19e9fab2814371387f9cef5c64161fe7cf4bdc542144202678ca9. We
may rebuild these later and distribute them individually in a more
formal fashion.

De

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A set of sample system images derived from the public emulators can be downloaded from https://yagi.h-net.org/p50em_samplemachines.tar.gz to
get you started. The tarball is 309078820 bytes, and its sha256sum is 8fe261f7a9f19e9fab2814371387f9cef5c64161fe7cf4bdc542144202678ca9. We
may rebuild these later and distribute them individually in a more
formal fashion.

An updated set of images is posted:

The tarball is 142882727 bytes, and its sha256sum is 32647dbcc3a0d541209eafc2f78d054e456d58046c9b3c5bc4ca64a8d9fc0037. V3
removes additional junk, and rebuilds the disk images as 600 MB drives,
split 30/10 heads filesystem/paging. This tarball preserves sparse
allocation ("holes"), so that uninitialized space in the disk images
does not occupy actual space. You may need to tell tar to preserve this
sparse allocation when you extract, e.g. with the -S option. Also
includes enhancements to the wrapper scripts: directory independence and
the ability to run the runem script from a terminal.

De

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Hi Dennis -- I see you've posted newer versions of the sample images, including https://sysovl.info/pages/blobs/emulator/p50em_samplemachines_v5.tar . I'm having a lot of fun re-familiarizing myself with some of the versions of Primos. I was able to
easily start up the full collection of VMs with all the versions of Primos in the sample images collection. My most productive years of programming on Primos were mostly using the Pacer C compiler on a 9750 and later on the same system after it was
ugpraded to a 9955-II. I was happy to see that C compiler included in the Primos 23 sample image. But I'm having troubles compiling a test "Hello, World" program. It appears that stdio.h (stdio.h.ins.cc) and most other C include files didn't get
installed in Rev 23 sample disk image, unless I'm missing something:

OK, LD SYSCOM>@@CC@@

<SYS23K>SYSCOM (LUR access)
518 records in this directory, 518 total records out of quota of 0.

17 Files.

A$KEYS.H.INS.CC A$KEYS.INS.CC DS$SEVERITY_KEYS.H.INS.CC
ERRD.H.INS.CC ERRD.INS.CC ERRORMSGHDLR.H.INS.CC
ISC_KEYS.H.INS.CC ISC_STRUCTURES.H.INS.CC
KEYS.H.INS.CC KEYS.INS.CC SRS_CODES.H.INS.CC
SYNC_CODES.H.INS.CC TIMERMIK.H.INS.CC
USER_TYPES.H.INS.CC UT_KEYS.H.INS.CC UT_KEYS.INS.CC X$KEYS.H.INS.CC

OK,

I don't see STDIO.H.INS.CC there or anywhere else I could think of to look on the rev 23 disk:

OK, LD -DISPLAY_MATCHES MFD>@@>STD@@
Insufficient access rights. MFD>DSM* (ld)
Insufficient access rights. MFD>DSM* (std$cp)

<SYS23K>TRANSLATORS>HELP*>PRIMOS.TEXT>FTN (LUR access)
39 records in this directory, 39 total records out of quota of 0.

1 File.

STDOPT.HELP

Insufficient access rights. MFD>BATCHQ>Q.CTRL (ld)
Insufficient access rights. MFD>BATCHQ>Q.CTRL (std$cp)
Insufficient access rights. MFD>BATCHQ>CIFILE (ld)
Insufficient access rights. MFD>BATCHQ>CIFILE (std$cp)

<SYS23K>HELP*>PRIMOS.TEXT>FTN (LUR access)
39 records in this directory, 39 total records out of quota of 0.

1 File.

STDOPT.HELP

Insufficient access rights. MFD>SAD>DEFAULT (ld)
Insufficient access rights. MFD>SAD>DEFAULT (std$cp)
ER!

Is there some .COMI or .CPL file I need to use to install the C header files on Rev23?

FYI, I *DO* see the C header files on the Rev22 disk. I supposed I could just try copying them from the Rev23 disk to the Rev24 disk, but even if that seemed to work I'd always wonder if problems with C coding in Rev24 were due to my own code or my
using the C headers grabbed from the Rev23 C compiler install.

OK, LD <SYS221>SYSCOM>@@CC@@

<SYS221>SYSCOM (LUR access)
556 records in this directory, 556 total records out of quota of 0.

41 Files.

A$KEYS.H.INS.CC A$KEYS.INS.CC ASSERT.H.INS.CC CTYPE.H.INS.CC
ERRD.H.INS.CC ERRD.INS.CC ERRNO.H.INS.CC ERRORMSGHDLR.H.INS.CC FLOAT.H.INS.CC FN_DCLS.H.INS.CC FN_DFGEN.H.INS.CC
FN_ERRS.H.INS.CC FN_GLOBALS.H.INS.CC FN_KEYS.H.INS.CC ISC_KEYS.H.INS.CC ISC_STRUCTURES.H.INS.CC
KEYS.H.INS.CC KEYS.INS.CC LIMITS.H.INS.CC LOCALE.H.INS.CC MATH.H.INS.CC PARM.K.INS.CC PRIME_ECS_CHARS.H.INS.CC
SETJMP.H.INS.CC SIGNAL.H.INS.CC SRS_CODES.H.INS.CC
STAT.H.INS.CC STDARG.H.INS.CC STDDEF.H.INS.CC STDIO.H.INS.CC STDLIB.H.INS.CC STRING.H.INS.CC STRINGS.H.INS.CC SYNC_CODES.H.INS.CC SYSTEMSPROGRAMMING.H.INS.CC TERM.H.INS.CC TIME.H.INS.CC
TIMEB.H.INS.CC TIMERMIK.H.INS.CC USER_TYPES.H.INS.CC X$KEYS.H.INS.CC

OK,

Thanks for any guidance on this. And thank you and Jim for sharing Jim's wonderful Prime emulator and these pre-built Primos disk images.

-- Ron

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HI

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It appears that stdio.h (stdio.h.ins.cc) and most other C include files didn't get installed in Rev 23 sample disk image, unless I'm missing something:

I don't see STDIO.H.INS.CC there or anywhere else I could think of to
look on the rev 23 disk:

Ron,

Since we don't have very many releases, and the layered products with
each one vary, it's possible Jim installed the compiler from a version
that doesn't strictly match.

It actually looks to me like all of the emulators have to be up and
running for the compiler to work at all on 23, because some key part
of it is not on the local disk.:

OK, cc f.c
Not found. (OPENT$)

Thanks for the report - I'll see if I can get the images sorted out,
and post v6.

In the meantime, if you're feeling adventurous, there's a tape image
with just the Rev. 23 CC compiler here:

https://yagi.h-net.org/prime_software/cc23.tap

De

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On Sunday, April 12, 2020 at 4:38:37 PM UTC-4, Dennis Boone wrote:

It actually looks to me like all of the emulators have to be up and
running for the compiler to work at all on 23, because some key part
of it is not on the local disk.:

OK, cc f.c
Not found. (OPENT$)

Thanks for the report - I'll see if I can get the images sorted out,
and post v6.

In the meantime, if you're feeling adventurous, there's a tape image
with just the Rev. 23 CC compiler here:

https://yagi.h-net.org/prime_software/cc23.tap

Dennis -- Thanks! I experienced the same "not found" for CC that you show. But CI seemed to run properly, aside from the missing C include files. It's shocking what I remember and don't from Primos. "A <subdir> 1 2" and SLIST are apparently still in
my muscle memory, but I did so little myself with tapes that I'll need to re-learn MAGRST. I'll try restoring from the C compiler tape image you linked to. I'll probably eventually be as foolishly pleased with myself as when I was first allowed to
touch our 9-track drive and mount a tape so that I could use MAGSAV and MAGRST myself instead of relying on an operator. -- Ron

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On Sunday, April 12, 2020 at 4:38:37 PM UTC-4, Dennis Boone wrote:

In the meantime, if you're feeling adventurous, there's a tape image
with just the Rev. 23 CC compiler here:

https://yagi.h-net.org/prime_software/cc23.tap

Well that was almost too easy. I made a tape-images directory in pub, placed a copy of cc23.tap in there, made a symlink from pub/tape-imgages/cc23.tap to pub/23/mt0 and then at the console in Rev23 while attached to the MFD I did a MAGRST for tape unit
0 logical tape 1. Then in the restored CC directory I ran the installer (R CC.INSTALL) and shared the C compilers (COMI CC.SHARE.COMI). Then in the GUEST account I compiled and linked hello.cc:

OK, stat sy

System EM23 is currently running PRIMOS rev. 23.4.Y2K.R1
Copyright (c) Computervision, Corp. 1993

OK, slist hello.cc
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
/* printf function displays the content that is
* passed between the double quotes.
*/
printf("Hello World!\n");
return 0;
}
OK, cc hello
[CC Rev. T3.2-23.0 Copyright (c) 1992, Prime Computer, Inc.]
[Serial #ABC1-DEFG23-HI3J (PRIME COMPUTER)]
00 Errors and 00 Warnings detected in 9 lines and 191 include lines.
OK, bind
[BIND Rev. T3.2-23.0 Copyright (c) 1992, Prime Computer, Inc.]
: lo hello.bin
: li c_lib
BIND COMPLETE
: file
OK, r hello
Hello World!
OK,

Thank you Dennis!!

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Well that was almost too easy. I made a tape-images directory in pub, placed a copy of cc23.tap in there, made a symlink from pub/tape-imgages/cc23.tap to pub/23/mt0 and then at the console in Rev23 while attached to the MFD I did a MAGRST for tape unit 0 logical tape 1. Then in the restored CC directory I ran the installer (R CC.INSTALL) and shared the C compilers (COMI CC.SHARE.COMI). Then in the GUEST account
I compiled and linked hello.cc:

Great! Glad it was easy. Thanks for sharing how you did it, as
that might help someone else.

De

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On Wednesday, 11 March 2020 15:34:14 UTC, Jim Wilcoxson wrote:

Today, with much help from Dennis Boone, I'm releasing the Prime emulator source code on GitHub for non-commercial use.

[snip]

I hope you enjoy it too! https://github.com/prirun

Jim

Hello Jim, Dennis and all other fellow (ex)Pr1mates! An enormous thank you to Jim for porting it to linux and making it available via github. I am now well and truly in Nostalgia City! Thanks!!!!

-Andrew M.

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