In case it's not clear from the previous posts, I wrote a simple emulator* and an assembler for the first commercial transistorised computer Metrovick 950. And this document is a manual for the emulator and assembler.

* Technically speaking, it's a simulator, and it stores instructions slightly differently from the original, but it should be mostly compatible. Which is good enough for a machine that barely has any documentation preserved. All 7 of them most likely were scrapped for parts half a century ago, too.

I have been reading the specification for MV 950 over and over for the last couple of weeks (as well as documents for other Gen 1 and Gen 2 computers, including famous Bendix G-15 that uses similar magnetic drum memory), and my head is overflowing with ideas and a-ha moments.

This thing might look like a pile of junk that will wreck your electricity bill, but its power draw is comparable with a high-spec gaming PC. This thing looks like no useful modern-style computing can be done with it, but it runs faster than some BASIC microcomputers. Its contemporaries had plotters and seek-able magnetic tape storage systems.

I want to try and edit texts with it, draw anime girls with it, play music with it, maybe run a small inventory database. It should be able to handle these tasks flawlessly.

And I am especially passionate about it because computers of this scale and scope can be made with low-tech, in a garage, without semiconductor factories.

Imagine that the first-ever commercial transistor computer fell into your laps (figuratively!). What would you do with it? Is it even practical to use?

Now you can answer these and many other questions, because I made a thing~

"My first transistorised computer: A Crash Course" is a short user manual for the simulator and the autocode/assembler of a computer highly inspired and mostly compatible with Metrovick 950, the first-ever commercially available transistor computer from 1956.

https://git.sr.ht/~nkali/mv950toy/tree/main/item/docs/crash_course.md

Roomba's commercial from 2002: "It will change the way you clean, forever"

MIT technology review, October 2002: "Roomba isn’t just for show. It does a fabulous job on the daily chore of sweeping or vacuuming. Roomba’s walk isn’t guaranteed to cover an entire floor, but in practice it does a very good job. For all of my excitement about the Roomba, I did encounter some minor problems. Despite these minor failings, Roomba is truly impressive."

In the meantime:

An open-ended question for all you computer geeks: what would you want to learn, see or try when it comes to first (vacuum tubes, 1948-1960) and second (transistors, 1956-1963) generation digital computers? Is it architecture? Capabilities? Software? Programming? Quirks? "Can it run Doom"? Things that became obsolete? Things that stayed the same? Something else completely?

Can't promise I'll deliver, but I'm curious to know!