After some discussions at the S4D conference last week, I have some additional updates to the history and technologies of reverse execution. I have found one new commercial product at a much earlier point in time, and an interesting note on memory consistency.
Category Archives: History Of Computing
“Eagle” Cycle-Accurate Simulator Anno 1979
I recently read the classic book The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. Even though it describes the project to build a machine that was launched more than 30 years ago, the story is still fresh and familiar. Corporate intrigue, managing difficult people, clever engineering, high pressure, all familiar ingredients in computing today just as it was back then. With my interesting in computer history and simulation, I was delighted to actually find a simulator in the story too! It was a cycle-accurate simulator of the design, programmed in 1979.
Reverse History Part Three – Products
In this final part of my series on the history of reverse debugging I will look at the products that launched around the mid-2000s and that finally made reverse debugging available in a commercially packaged product and not just research prototypes. Part one of this series provided a background on the technology and part two discussed various research papers on the topic going back to the early 1970s. The first commercial product featuring reverse debugging was launched in 2003, and then there have been a steady trickle of new products up until today.
Post updated 2012-09-28 with a revised history.
Reverse History Part Two – Research
This is the second post in my series on the history of reverse execution, covering various early research papers. It is clear that reverse debugging has been considered a good idea for a very long time. Sadly though, not a practical one (at the time). The idea is too obvious to be considered new. Here are some papers that I have found dating from the time before “practical” reverse debug which for me starts in 2003 (as well as a couple of later entrants).
Reverse History Part One
For some reason, when I think of reverse execution and debugging, the sound track that goes through my head is a UK novelty hit from 1987, “Star Trekkin” by the Firm. It contains the memorable line “we’re only going forward ’cause we can’t find reverse“. To me, that sums up the history of reverse debugging nicely. The only reason we are not all using it every day is that practical reverse debugging has not been available until quite recently. However, in the past ten years, I think we can say that software development has indeed found reverse. It took a while to get there, however. This is the first of a series of blog posts that will try to cover some of the history of reverse debugging. The text turned out to be so long that I had to break it up to make each post usefully short. Part two is about research, and part three about products.
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DV* 30 Years
On the very binary date of 11-11-11, my alma mater, the computer science (DV, for datavetenskap) education at Uppsala University celebrated its thirty years’ anniversary. It was a great classic student party in the evening with a nice mix of old alumni and fresh-faced students. Lots of singing and some nice skits on stage. Great fun, and my voice has still not recovered. It also got me thinking about it is that we really do as computer scientists.
Wind River Blog: Surfing the Web with Netscape 4
Just for fun, I tried to surf the web of today using a Netscape 4 browser from 2001.
The result: not exactly useful. Netscape 4 was bad back then, and it does not work at all with the current style of web coding.
IBM i – I’m Impressed
From what little I had heard and read, the IBM AS/400 (later known as iSeries, and now known as simply IBM i) sounded like a fascinating system. I knew that it had a rich OS stack that contained most of the services a program needs, and a JVM-style byte code format for applications that let it change from custom processors to Power Architecture without impacting users at all. It was supposedly business-critical and IBM-quality rock solid. But that was about it.
So when Software Engineering Radio episode 177 interviewed the i chief architect Steve Will, I was hooked. It turned out that IBM i was cooler than I imagined. Here are my notes on why I think that IBM i is one of the most interesting systems out there in real use.
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Steve Furber: Emulated BBC Micro on Archimedes on PC
I just read an interview with Steve Furber, the original ARM designer, in the May 2011 issue of the Communications of the ACM. It is a good read about the early days of the home computing revolution in the UK. He not only designed the ARM processor, but also the BBC Micro and some other early machines.
Wind River Blog: 20, 30, 60 years ago
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about some computing history. Wind River turns thirty this year, Simics twenty, and simulation for debug (and probably debug in general) turns sixty. Computing has come a long way.
Cubase64 – Impressive Impossible Retro
I recently read the “Cubase64 White Paper” by Pex Tufvesson. It is a fantastic piece of retro computing, where he makes a Commodore 64 do real-time audio effects on a sampled piece of music. There is a Youtube movie showing the demo in action. Considering how hard we worked in the early 1980s to make a computer make any kind of useful noise at all, this is an amazing feat. It is also a feat that I think would have been impossible at the time.
Simple Machine, Hard to Simulate
In the June 2010 issue of Communications of the ACM, as well as the April 2010 edition of the ACM Queue magazine, George Phillips discusses the development of a simulator for the graphics system of the 1977 Tandy-RadioShack TRS-80 home computer. It is a very interesting read for all interested in simulation, as well as a good example of just why this kind of old hardware is much harder to simulate than more recent machines.
EDSAC – First Bootloader and Assembler
The EDSAC was an early computer in the mathematics laboratory at Cambridge in the UK. I have just read an old article on the machine and how it was programmed, from a 1998 issue of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.
There are many fascinating aspects to the machine and its utter simplicity, but one that struck me as I read the paper was that so many of the fundamental ideas of programming and practical computing were invented then and there. Indeed, the EDSAC was designed as a machine to experiment with programming, rather than as a machine for maximal computing performance.
Pipeline Performance Simulator Anno 1960
I have just found what almost has to be the first cycle-accurate computer simulator in history. According to the article “Stretch-ing is Great Exercise — It Gets You in Shape to Win” by Frederick Brooks (the man behind the Mythical Man-Month) in the January-March 2010 issue of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, IBM created a simulator of the pipeline for the IBM 7030 “Stretch” computer developed from 1956 to 1961 (photo from IBM.com).
Matt’s Today in History: System/360
I am a regular listener to the Matt’s Today in History podcast. When Matt asked for contributions for this spring (in order to meet a goal of 500 podcasts before Summer) I did give some thought to what I could contribute. Looking over some books, I found one suitable Spring date: the launch of the IBM System/360 back in 1964. The resulting podcast is now live at Matt’s Today in History.
Please be kind to any mistakes… I am trying to paint a broad picture for a computer-history-ignorant audience here.
It was Twenty Years Ago Today
Unless you have been living under a rock I guess the media deluge has made it clear that it was twenty years ago on November ninth that the Berlin Wall fell. Wow. Without a doubt the most momentous and important event that I have lived through. Not at all on the topic of this blog, but important enough to write some personal recollections about.
25 Microchips that “Shook the World”
IEEE Spectrum has an article in its May 2009 issue called “25 Microchips that shook the world“. Not long or deep, but an interesting mix of chips from the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and the 2000s. Recommended as light reading.
When does Hardware Acceleration make Sense in Networking?
Yes, when does hardware acceleration make sense in networking? Hardware acceleration in the common sense of “TCP offload”. This question was answered by a very nicely reasoned “no” in an article by Mike Odell in ACM Queue called “Network Front-End Processors, Yet Again“.
Book review: ZX Spectrum BASIC
I just rediscovered my first computer, a Sinclair ZX Spectrum (good picture) which I bought back in 1983 or 1984 (I have no trace of the exact date, unfortunately). The machine was a perfect machine to learn programming on in my opinion, consisting of little more than a Z80 processor with memory, bit-mapped display (with a famously odd-ball addressing scheme and color handling) and ultra-simple sound output and input. Most of my friends in the end bought Commodore C64 machines, which had more powerful graphics and sound hardware, but a processor that was much less fun to program.
The Spectrum came with a built-in BASIC interpreter that are up the bottom 16kB of the 64kB addressing space. The BASIC was actually fairly powerful and easy-to-use, and included a very fun programming textbook. I just reread that textbook, and it is quite strikingly well-written and manages to cover both basic computer-science-style programming and deep close-to-the-machine and real-time programming in a compact 150 pages. There is no credit to a particular author in the book I have (Swedish translation by a group of people at Ord & Form here in Uppsala), but an online scan credits Steven Vickers.
Off-Topic: Vista, Laserwriter 12/640 PS, and FoxIt
I have an old Apple LaserWriter 12/640 PS network printer at home that I bought back in 1997. In those days, I had a PowerBook G3 at 266 MHz, Windows NT was new, and my work computer was one of Sweden’s first 300 MHz Pentium II machines… since then, my home machines have moved from MacOS 8 to Windows NT 4 to Windows 2000 to Windows XP and now Windows Vista 32- and 64-bit. But the trusty LaserWriter remains, keeps printing, and is still on its first toner cartridge!
However, moving to Vista has made the printing bit harder.
Off-topic: Computer Nostalgia at Stackoverflow
Strongly recommended thread at stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/102714/what-was-your-first-home-computer is about your first home computer. Some good product shots, and also some really funny things inserted.
Virtual Platforms for Late Hardware and the Winds of History
As might be evident from this blog, I do have a certain interest in history and the history of computing in particular. One aspect where computing and history collide in a not-so-nice way today is in the archiving of digital data for the long term. I just read an article at Forskning och Framsteg where they discuss some of the issues that use of digital computer systems and digital non-physical documents have on the long-term archival of our intellectual world of today. Basically, digital archives tend to rot in a variety of ways. I think virtual platform technology could play a role in preserving our digital heritage for the future.
Virtual Platform by Virtualization Extensions — 1969
By means of a trip down virtualization history, I found a real gem in 1969 paper called A program simulator by partial interpretation, by Kazuhiro Fuchi, Hozumi Tanaka, Yuriko Manago, Toshitsugu Yuba of the Japanese Government Electrotechnical Laboratory. It was published at the second symposium on Operating systems principles (SOSP) in 1969. It describes a system where regular target instructions are directly interpreted, and any privileged instructions are trapped and simulated. Very similar to how VmWare does it for x86, or any other modern virtualization solution.
A logo from 1996 and simulation for archival purposes
Back in 1996, DVP celebrated its 15th anniversary. When looking through my digital and paper archive, I found this gem: 
The official badge and logo for the 1996 anniversary! We also produced some mouse pads with this logo on them, one of which I still use for my daily job. Pretty good quality I must say.
The picture shown here was saved as GIF for use on the web. But scarily enough, apart from a few more GIF files, I could not open or even understand the file type of most of the files from that time, only ten years ago. Our digital archives are not very robust — more on that below.
The Simulation of the first Amiga Custom Chips (1983)
ArsTechnica is running a history of the Amiga, and in part 3, “The first prototype” they describe a really interesting “simulation” solution for the custom chips in the first Amiga. This is in 1982-83, and there are no VHDL or Verilog simulators, nor any other EDA tools as we know them today. Even if they were, the Amiga company would not have been able to afford them. So in order to test their design, the Amiga engineers built chip replicas using breadboards and discrete logic chips. All in all, 7200 chips and a very large numbers of wires. Quite fascinating stuff, and they did manage to interface the main 68000 CPU to the breadboards and get a fully functional if a bit slow simulation of a complete Amiga computer with all its unique custom chips.