Log in to the history of computing for free. 28 systems are waiting

Just go to connect.sdf.org and enter “menu” to gain access to the list of 28 systems as a guest. Sounds like something for hobbyists and nerds? Definitely yes, but that’s the point. This is not another website with Atari or Commodore emulators tailored for a mass audience. It’s something much more serious and much more magical.

Joint initiative Interim Computer Museum (ICM) and SDF.org – a non-profit organization dealing with, among others, providing shell servers since 1987 – results in something that can easily be called a living time capsule of computer history.

After entering menu what you see is a list divided into two pages, with three columns: the selection letter, the name of the operating system and the “hardware” it runs on. The quotation marks are crucial here, because, as the creators themselves admit, some systems are authentic vintage hardware, some are emulation, and some are a hybrid of both. It’s not entirely clear what is what – and this, paradoxically, adds charm to the whole thing.

Pressing the appropriate letter and Enter takes you directly to the command line of the selected system. No graphics, no greeting for the random user. Blinking cursor and silence – and then we experience what cannot be bought in a retro gadget store.

The list of systems is a real cross-section of the history of computerization. On the first page of the menu you will find, among others:

Multics (option a, page 1) – a pioneering operating system from 1964, created jointly by MIT, General Electric and Bell Labs. Multics was the direct inspiration for Unix. Available here on Honeywell 6180, it operated in various institutions until the year 2000. Anyone interested in the history of operating systems knows that it is more or less like touching a dinosaur bone.

CDC 6500 (option m, page 1) with NOS 1.3 – a machine designed by Seymour Cray himself, before he founded the legendary Cray Research. The architecture of this beast assumed one main processor and as many as 10 peripheral processors. In the 1960s and 1970s, this was the height of scientific computing power.

A trio of TOPS-20 systems – with a characteristic prompt @ and software from the era of ARPANET, the predecessor of the modern Internet. It was on TOPS machines that the mechanisms that still power the network were invented.

The menu is waiting on the second page UNIX V7 on PDP-11/70operating under the pseudonym “MissPiggy”. For many researchers of the history of computer science, this system is the Rosetta Stone of UNIX – the code that shaped the DNA of virtually all modern operating systems, from macOS to Android.

And here we come to the point: what can you actually do on these systems? This is a question that anyone who grew up using Windows will ask. The answer is simple: everything that people did on computers when the Internet looked like a list of files and games had no graphics – but they had soul.

We can run it on MissPiggy (UNIX V7). chess – a text version of chess, where the entire game is followed through notation, without any board. Sounds like torture? For someone who remembers the times when people were excited about the mere fact that a computer was playing chess, this is simply history in action.

Classic games from the mainframe era are available on TOPS-20 systems: Adventure (also known as Colossal Cave Adventure) – the mother of all text games in which we explore a cave by entering commands like GO NORTH Whether TAKE LAMP. The year is 1976. This is where computer RPGs began. Similarly Zorkthe cult Infocom game that later hit home computers and attracted millions of players on both sides of the Atlantic.

You can also play on machines from the PDP and Multix families Fortran and COBOL code – not because it’s exciting in itself, but because it was in such environments that programmers half a century ago built banking, aviation and government systems that – often – still operate today.

It’s worth being honest: Entering these systems without any preparation is like getting into a tractor without a driving license. The blinking cursor of the PDP-11 does not ask if we want a tutorial. Multics does not have a “Help” button. But that’s why it’s worth spending at least a quarter of an hour reading what to enter – because it’s very rewarding.

For older users, it’s pure, condensed nostalgia – the smell of a server room locked in a browser. For younger people – a chance to understand whyls” displays files where it comes from”sudo” and why terminal looks like this and not otherwise.