project utexas is a living time capsule of fifty year old hardware and software, all running on a raspberry pi and completely open for the explorations and experiments of all users. it’s a big, many layered, complex system, and it can hopefully converge towards modern expectations of friendliness and usability, given time and user feedback. meanwhile, it’s simply standing on the shoulders of giants as a raw untamed time-warp back to the utaustin computation center, circa 1980. here’s some discussion around those giants, and what they mean for day-to-day life with project utexas. the four ‘steps’ referred to here are the step1, step2, step3, step4 down towards the bottom of the project utexas readme

step1 and step2. hardware. the hardware aspects are thanks to richard cornwell, and a useful entrypoint is rich’s pdp10 hardware repo, and more broadly rich’s main hardware repo. rich is a member of the opensimh steering group. project utexas hardware can be a complex topic, as there were multiple generations of dec10 (ka, ki, kl, ks) and a zoo of attached devices. in a nutshell, it’s useful to gradually become familiar with the hardware aspects of utexas. for digital devices, fifty years mean nothing, and at least in a digital sense the hardware is very ‘real’ and ‘physical’.

step3 and step4. software. tops10, fortran iv, and other necessary low-level system code comes as binary tape images via rich’s personal website. the way to learn about using these is by example and experimentation. getting familiar with the system tapes is a first step to being able to modify the creation and usage of the project utexas tape ‘tapes/utexas.tap’. with that capability in hand, the next step is to be able to use the utexas tape to on-the-fly compile, link, and install decwar itself. improving that know-how is reflected in improvements to the simh script utexas.do.

to have on the radar. project utexas relates with the higher-level pidp-10 project. utexas was directly triggered and inspired by the release of the pidp-10 in the summer of 2024. all of the work and good spirit of oscar, lars, and rich are further inspiration. ideally utexas can be fully integrated within the pidp-10 ‘ecosystem’. there are good questions to tackle here, especially around interactions between ka and kl simh exes, and also the pdpcontrol bash script associated with the pidp-10 package. these are simply question marks to keep on the radar and learn about along the way. one thing to keep in mind is that decwar requires fortran iv, an earlier fortran than the fortran-10 commonly encountered these days. it’s possible that fortran iv integration will play a major role in the future of utexas within pidp-10.