The DPS8M Development Team officially announces the new DPS8M Blog.

The DPS8M Blog will cover all topics surrounding the Honeywell 6000-series and the DPS8M Simulator.

You can expect posts from our developers about both hardware and software, with a particular focus on the Multics system (both current and historical), but we’ll also touch on GCOS-3 and CP-6, as well as adjacent Honeywell technologies such as the 18-bit DATANET/355 line of network processors, and even the Honeywell Level 6 minicomputers and the Goodyear STARAN or Cray systems that were often paired with Honeywell large systems for scientific computing.

Charles Anthony has proposed extensions to Multics to enable enhanced performance and functionality when Multics is executing in the simulated environment.

This post aims to gather early feedback from relevant stakeholders and interested parties to reach a consensus before drafting and submitting an official MCR. Therefore, the following proposal should be considered to be suggestions and are intended as discussion points, not prescriptions.

This post is going to discuss some of the specifics of the FPGA implementation of the Honeywell DATANET 6678 Front-End Network Processor.

First off, one of the main goals of this project, aside from achieving the end result, is to gain a thorough understanding of FPGA design and programming. To help accomplish this goal, I am reading the book “Computer Architecture Tutorial Using an FPGA” by Robert Dunne. This book provides excellent tutorials on FPGA programming using Verilog with the Terasic DE-10 Lite development board and offers a detailed guide on implementing a 32-bit ARM processor. I highly recommend this book.

DPS8M R3.0.2 is coming soon.

DPS8M R3.0.2 will be an incremental release that includes bug fixes and performance enhancements developed over the last year, and is intended to get these improvements into the hands of our users before the release of the next major version of the simulator, which will include new features (and potentially breaking changes).

We’re excited to announce an ambitious long-term project, currently in the early stages, to implement as much of the DPS‑8/M mainframe architecture as possible using one (or more) FPGAs — with the ability to run the full Multics operating system — is now underway, led by Dean S. Anderson.

In the early 1980s, Dean started as a computer operator at Gelco on a large Honeywell Series‑60 ∕ Level‑66 dual processor mainframe (eventually converted to a four processor DPS‑8) running GCOS‑3. Over time, he worked his way through Gelco’s Production Control and Special Projects groups writing programs to automate the Computer Operations Department. This included writing GCOS‑3 kernel modifications for special handling of tapes.

DNF/Yum repositories for DPS8M are available.

If you use an RPM-based Linux distribution with the DNF (or Yum) package manager (including Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Amazon Linux 2, and compatibles such as Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, EulerOS, etc.) you can keep your DPS8M current with automatic updates.

• We currently provide x86_64 (AMD64), i686 (x86), aarch64 (ARMv8, 64-bit), ppc64 (G5/PPC970+), ppc64le (POWER8+), s390x (z/Arch, 64-bit), and riscv64 (RV64) packages that are compatible with any Linux distribution. Packages are provided for both the stable and bleeding edge DPS8M releases.

The repositories are served securely via TLS and only primary DPS8M Development Team members (and GitLab CI, which builds the packages) control the files served from the ‘dps8m/repo’ namespace. You can also view the GitLab CI logs to examine how these packages are generated from our official binaries.

I was recently approached by a friend who needed some help getting DPS8M running on an Android tablet.

The DPS8M simulator has been running on Android devices for a long time now, with early support initially committed back in November 2014, targeting Android 5 Lollipop, by Charles Anthony. This was done in response to a post to the mailing list from a Multics user waiting for the day that a full Multics system could run “in your pocket”.

Finally, you can run dozens of multiprocessing Multics instances along side your mission-critical IBM AIX (PASE) and IBM i (OS/400) workloads on IBM Power Systems hardware!

This is the virtualization solution your IT department has been waiting for… well, perhaps it isn’t — but supporting this platform is a great demonstration of both the capabilities of the IBM PASE for i (Portable Application Solutions Environment) runtime for enabling OSS on IBM i, and the excellent compatibility and portability of the DPS8M simulator software.

DPS8M Simulator R3.0.1 Released!

The DPS8M Development Team is proud to present the latest stable version of DPS8M, the DPS‑8/M mainframe simulator: DPS8M Release 3.0.1.

DPS8M is a simulator of the 36‑bit GE Large Systems / Honeywell / Bull 600/6000‑series mainframe computers (Honeywell 6180, Honeywell Series‑60/Level‑68, and Honeywell/Bull DPS‑8/M), descended from the GE‑645 and engineered to support the Multics operating system.

DPS8M Simulator R3.0.0 Released!

The DPS8M Development Team is happy to announce that version R3.0.0 of the DPS8M Simulator has been released.

Many issues were fixed, features added, and performance was improved in many areas.

[2024 Update] DPS8M R3.0.0 downloads are available from the DPS8M Historical Archives. See the release notes and mailing list announcement for (obsolete) details.