Running a Minecraft Server and more on a 1960s UNIVAC Computer
farlow.dev

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213 points

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brilee

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4 days ago

33 comments

chasil ・ 11 hours ago

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...

deweywsu ・ 12 hours ago

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!

proxysna ・ 18 hours ago

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?".

  • egypturnash ・ 10 hours ago

    From the article:

    Only 40,960 words of memory. That’s only 90kb total memory to split between our code and the memory it needs at runtime.

    Looking at a copy of Doom on the Internet Archive (https://ia800404.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/15...), DOOM.EXE is about 709k, and DOOM.WAD is about 11159k.

    I think that's a pretty solid no.

    Also it's a 250khz CPU. Not megahertz. Kilohertz. It's slower than the 1MHZ 8-bit home computers like the Apple ][ or c64.

    "Running" Doom might be possible with some insane hack that offloads storage and/or processing to more modern hardware crammed into the UNIVAC case but given that this is one of two UNIVACs in the entire world, and the only one that actually runs, I don't think the museum is gonna let anyone cram a Raspberry Pi up in there.

  • zimpenfish ・ 18 hours ago

    > a bit of a bait

    "a bit" is doing a lot of work there. It was absolute nonsense. They were no closer to running a Minecraft server than I am to running UKGOV.

    • voidUpdate ・ 18 hours ago

      They hosted a program that allowed minecraft clients to connect... I'd class that as a minecraft server, even if it wasn't a very good one

      • zimpenfish ・ 15 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        > They hosted a program that allowed minecraft clients to connect...

        Connect in the sense of receiving a login packet and saying "yes". That's it. Steps 1, 2, 3, 9, 10 of [0] (they didn't mention encryption or compression, I'm assuming they didn't implement it.)

        They didn't mention anything about any of the steps past 10 - again, assuming they didn't implement them.

        It's a trivial thing they've implemented - good work, sure, but a Minecraft server? Absolutely not.

        [0] https://minecraft.wiki/w/Java_Edition_protocol/FAQ#What's_th...?

      • proxysna ・ 18 hours ago

        Yeah, my thought exactly, execution lacked, but i do admire the attempt.

  • voidUpdate ・ 17 hours ago

    It could probably run the code for doom, once recompiled for the risc-v emulator, but given that the only output is a paper teletype, displaying it would be a problem

    • toast0 ・ 16 hours ago

      > but given that the only output is a paper teletype, displaying it would be a problem

      You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike. A cacodaemon floats by, hissing.

    • kmoser ・ 11 hours ago

      I wonder which would be faster: computing a frame, or printing it? If you could print one frame at a time, you could make a flip-book animation.

    • Cthulhu_ ・ 17 hours ago

      And given the NES emulator example, take half an hour per frame.

  • jandrese ・ 14 hours ago

    Feels kind of like when Usagi Eletric got "Doom" running on a vacuum tube computer with a teletype interface without support for even ASCII, but it was just an imitation of the background music.

    Anything for the thumbnail.

kaladin-jasnah ・ 18 hours ago

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.

  • feedmittens ・ 12 hours ago

    Yeah, I was there on Saturday and could not imagine how it would end the next day. Got to see the Univac powered up but not spitting out those awesome outputs at the time.

vaughnegut ・ 17 hours ago

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.

  • voidUpdate ・ 17 hours ago

    According to the article, it takes 40 univac instructions to run a single risc-v instruction, so potentially up to 40x the current performance. Though you'd probably need more instructions to do things than a single one, so probably less than that, say 10-20x? Especially if you made a custom compiler that made the best use of the hardware you could, since it's weird

    • commandlinefan ・ 15 hours ago

      > it takes 40 univac instructions to run a single risc-v instruction

      Which is wild, given:

      > The computer’s original purpose was to be used by the Navy to read in radar signals and direct artillery

      I'd really be fascinated to see how that was done on such a primitive machine, shame that's probably been lost.

      • mrgaro ・ 13 hours ago

        The radar "reading" was done by first plotting analog radar signals to the antique rotary radar displays. Then there would be human operators with a light pen, marking each radar signature on each radar turn.

        So the Univac would receive input coordinates for each target and track those in memory each turn.

    • dmitrygr ・ 8 hours ago

      RISCV is a VEEEEERY poor emulation target - the piecemeal scattering of immediates all over the instr makes it very slow to assemble them (lots of ANDs, shifts, and ORs) . Re-encoding them is one solution, yeah, but then this is a mandatory messy post-compilation step that also needs to know what is code and what is data. It is almost a pessimal setup. MIPS is much simpler to emulate

      • ink_13 ・ 6 hours ago
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        Hey, wait a minute, you're the guy who got Linux to run on a 4004 by writing a MIPS emulator[1]! If there's anyone who's been down a similar path before it'd have to be you.

        [1] - https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=35.%20Linux4004

        • dmitrygr ・ 6 hours ago

          Yup. And that one of the reasons why not RISCV

invalidSyntax ・ 5 hours ago

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

dmitrygr ・ 8 hours ago

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

mghackerlady ・ 17 hours ago

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!

petterroea ・ 15 hours ago

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

  • mmastrac ・ 15 hours ago

    I'm not sure if LLVM would support ones-compliment (does GCC even support that any more?)

djmips ・ 14 hours ago

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

hassaanr ・ 10 hours ago

Incredibly cool project and fantastic write up!

kls0e ・ 16 hours ago

beautiful, thank you