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.

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.

DPS8M Simulator R2.0.0 Released!

The DPS8M Development Team team is pleased to announce the release of R2.0.0.

[2024 Update] DPS8M R2.0.0 downloads are available from the DPS8M Historical Archives. See the (legacy) RingZero Release 2.0.0 page and mailing list announcement for (obsolete) details.

• Increased stability
• Increased performance
• Improved operator console scripting
• Improved operator console functionality
• GTSS fixes
• Improved FNP networking controls
• Devices.txt file eliminated
• All disks type supported
• Optional support for multiple simulated CPUs

Multics History: https://multicians.org/
Multics Now: https://multics-wiki.swenson.org/
DPS8M Homepage: https://dps8m.gitlab.io/
DPS8M Simulator Legacy Wiki: https://ringzero.wikidot.com/
DPS8M Developers Wiki: https://gitlab.com/dps8m/dps8m/-/wikis
DPS8M Simulator Repository: https://gitlab.com/dps8m/dps8m/

DPS8M Simulator R1.0.0 Released!

The DPS8M Development Team is pleased to announce the release of DPS8M R1.0.0.

[2024 Update] DPS8M R1.0.0 downloads are available from the DPS8M Historical Archives. See the (legacy) RingZero Release 1.0.0 page for (obsolete) details.

This release features:

• FNP emulation rewrite
• APU rewrite
• IMFT support
• A multitude of bug fixes

This release of the simulator should be compatible with all Multics releases, but has only been tested against MR12.6e and MR12.6f Beta.