Refers to emulations of way-behind-the-state-of-the-art hardware or
software, or implementations of never-was-state-of-the-art; esp. if such
implementations are elaborate practical jokes and/or parodies, written
mostly for hack value, of more ‘serious’
designs. Perhaps the most widely distributed retrocomputing utility was
the
pnch(6)
or
bcd(6)
program on V7 and other early Unix versions, which would accept up to 80
characters of text argument and display the corresponding pattern in
punched card code. Other well-known retrocomputing
hacks have included the programming language
INTERCAL, a JCL-emulating
shell for Unix, the card-punch-emulating editor named 029, and various
elaborate PDP-11 hardware emulators and RT-11 OS emulators written just to
keep an old, sourceless Zork binary running.
A tasty selection of retrocomputing programs are made available at
the Retrocomputing Museum, http://www.catb.org/retro/.
