brainwagon

I 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 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.

NASA’s Genesis probe was to have parachuted into our atmosphere and snagged by special helicopters ala the old Corona project, but apparently the chutes didn’t open and bad things resulted. it is unclear whether the mission payload could be salvaged.

Oops.