Item Subject: MPE on a Notebook (or PC)
John Korb writes:
>I seem to remember that four to six years ago there was a small firm at
>some of the INTEREX conferences that had "an MPE emulator" running on a PC.
 
[snip]
 
>I don't know what happened to the company or the product, but I can only
>assume that there were copyright and licensing problems.  Anyone else
>remember this?  Anyone know what happened to the developers and their
>creation?
 
We had a long thread on this within the last year or so, so you might
want to search the HP3000-L list archives to see the old discussions.
 
Someone found the guy who did the development work (who, as I recall,
was rather bitter about the whole experience) who suggested he might
be willing to make the software shareware or freeware I believe.  I
think their biggest problems were the licensing and copyright issues.
I got the impression that HP may have stomped on them at the time.
 
Their approach (as I recall) was to emulate the instruction set and
then implement their own intrinsics and whatnot that your program
would be calling.  At the time they demoed at Interex, they had enough
of the basic file system intrinsics working to run EDITOR.PUB.SYS.
Their datasheet/pricelist listed Image, VPlus, and KSAM as 'future'
enhancements.
 
I believe that this is the wrong approach for getting MPE onto a PC
as it makes you responsible for re-implementing *all* of the MPE/V
operating system and its subsystems that you want to have.
 
>Considering the power to today's laptops, they might be able to
>provide Denys with a Series 70 equivalent that would fit under an
>aircraft seat.
 
If people will be happy with a Series 70 (that is, an MPE/V system
not an MPE/iX system), then there is not *that* much work required
to make it happen, and I don't think that a laptop with the speed
of a Series 70 is too much to expect.
 
Recently I've been playing with a program called AppleWin which is
a 32bit Windows application that does 100% emulation of an Apple II
computer with all the graphics, sound, and related hardware.  There
are FTP sites that have disk images of all the old classic Apple II
software that you can download and run on the thing.  Not only is
the emulation 100%, but it can run 19 TIMES FASTER than a real
Apple II (on my 133Mhz Pentium).
 
IMNSHO, the *right* way to do MPE on a PC is to write a 100% emulation
of the *hardware* of an MPE/V system (say a Series 42 for simplicity),
and run the real full-blown MPE/V operating system on it.  This gets
you all the subsystems, compilers, etc., and should let you run *any*
MPE/V application on a PC.  If we emulate an MPE/V LANIC card, then
there is no reason why NS should not work, allowing you to :DSLINE,
use NetBase, login from PCs through VT, etc.
 
>Hmmm.  Now where did I put that old machine instruction set manual?
 
Mine's right here on my desk.  Writing a Classic 3000 emulator
has been on my list of things to do for a long time now, and
I've recently started reading through the instruction set
manual, and collecting development tools that would be useful.
It's one of those projects that I have no time for, and which
no one is paying me to work on, so it's questionable whether
anything will ever come of it, but if anyone is interested in
helping with the development, let me know.
 
I briefly talked with Roseville a year or two ago about what it
would take to put together a cheap PC license for MPE/V, and
they were at least willing to talk about it at that time.
 
G.