SIMH is one of the things that got me into embedded programming. I'm still very fond of this thing, and it's one of the first things that I install on any machi

SIMH is one of the things that got me into embedded programming. I'm still very fond of this thing, and it's one of the first things that I install on any machine that I have. I am not old enough to have used those machines in real life. I have seen some of them in real life, but only as a child. However, I was interested in computer history -- and I had been for quite some time (after stumbling upon ESR's edition of the Jargon file) when I ran into SIMH. This was back when documentation was pretty scarce, and Internet images slow. I got SIMH on my home computer by relying on floppy disks and a very understanding internet cafe operator. Shortly after, I got a dial-up connection, and managed to lug a few of the historical UNIX images, and boot them in a PDP-11 machine. I remember being astonished at how much could be achieved in (what seemed to me, back in the late 90s/early 00s) so little memory and with so little computational power. It's what got me interested in the whole "doing less with more" business. Many years later, it turned out to be useful knowledge; when I got my first job writing device drivers for a really tiny RTOS, 48 KB of flash and 4 KB of RAM seemed like a reasonably comfortable space to write code in. A few years later, I also got a hold of an OpenVMS copy -- which was actually pretty complicated because it involved signing up for DECUS Munchen (I still have my membership card!), which was not very easy considering that I was well under 18 and all the German words I knew were "Danke", "Gutten" and "Tag". I don't remember if SIMH or another emulator already had pcap-based networking support back then, but in any case, I ran a small OpenVMS machine and offered shell accounts to a few curious folks. The whole thing didn't really take off since the machine doing the hosting was the one I used every day for general computer stuff so... I think the other emulator I had tons of fun with back then was GXemul ( http://gxemul.sourceforge.net/ http://gxemul.sourceforge.net/ ). Warmly recommended, even today. It's a glimpse into interesting times -- I'm tempted to say "better times", but nostalgia is a little treacherous.