[TUHS] Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth, RIP John Walker

[Paul Ruizendaal <pnr@planet.nl>]

> Al Kossow wrote:
> 
> > there are emulators that can still run it, along with its small library of tools and applications. “NOS/MT was left in an arrested state” as John puts it.
> 
> URL?
> 
> I've never heard of a surviving copy

Your best start is here: http://www.powertrancortex.com

The UK Powertran Cortex was quite close to the Marinchip M9900 in capabilities and John’s software was ported to it. The website has an emulator and disk images for most of the user land and “MDEX” -- a simple executive that John wrote to bootstrap his software stack. This material survived in the hands of a few Powertran Cortex enthusiasts. They also had disks for NOS/MT (binaries + sysgen), but those were found after that website was made 10+ years ago.

The Powertran Cortex design was also used to build an industrial control computer, the PP95. The UK company behind that did most of the porting work and had a complete M9900 system to do the work on. In 2018 the inventory of that company was found in a garage including that M9900 system. Also more disk images and manuals, including the NOS/MT User Manual. The disks included a few that contained reconstituted (partial) source code for NOS/MT. With a little help from John, I was able to reconstitute the remainder of the source code. All this is not online.

I will contact you off list to see how this can be best preserved.

Paul