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.

As we noted in the previous post about performance, there are some conflicting performance claims about these systems, depending on where you look. Since the last post was more popular than expected, we’ve decided to do a short follow-up, this time relying on details from various Honeywell sales documents, such as the Series 6000 Summary Description (1971) and Honeywell Large Systems Product Guide (1984).

This post aims to show how the performance of systems implementing the 600/6000-series mainframe architecture evolved across hardware generations — and where the DPS8M Simulator fits in. It is not intended as an exhaustive reference for all models, instead focusing on the four generations of machines that ran the Multics operating system.

Multics-capable Mainframe Performance

Although exact details are often unclear (and we don’t have original systems available to run new benchmarks), we can present the graphic above, representing the various systems that were used for running Multics, with a very high level of confidence.

DPS8M Simulator R3.1.0 Released!

The DPS8M Development Team is proud to present the latest stable version of DPS8M, the DPS‑8/M mainframe simulator: DPS8M Release 3.1.0.

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.

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.

APT / DNF / Yum / Brew / Pacman 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.), a DEB-based Linux distribution (including Ubuntu, Debian, Raspberry Pi OS, Mint, etc.), Arch Linux (including Arch Linux 32 and Arch Linux ARM), or Homebrew (on macOS or Linux), you can keep your DPS8M current with automatic updates.

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”.