Daily Archives: 9/8/2004

The Original Brain Wagon

The Original BrainWagonI have to give credit where credit is due: the name “brainwagon” was first suggested by Tom Lokovic, based upon the theory of jamming two common words together that were easy to spell. Interestingly enough, when I did a web search to find other instances of the words “brain” and “wagon”, I found that a gentleman named Colonel Goethal had worked on the Panama Canal and had named his railcar “The Yellow Peril” (because of its color) or “The Brain Wagon”.

Too cool.

UNIX® on the Game Boy Advance

Unix on the Gameboy Advance!UNIX® on the Game Boy Advance is an implementation of the 5th version of the Unix Operating System for the ARM chip inside the gameboy. To do this, it runs SIMH, a PDP-11 simulator which has been ported to a bunch of different systems. The original RK05 disk image is combined with the PDP-11 simulator to make a functioning 5th Edition workstation.

It’s… just… brilliant.

On the right, you can see a screendump. Notice that it is compiling a simple Hello World C program.

If you are into this stuff, you can get lots of different PDP-11 software off the net with a minimum of searching.