Dusty Decks: Preserving historic software
by Paul McJones
Hardware, software, and emulators for UNIVAC computers, especially the original UNIVAC I and II
Peter Z. Ingerman comments:
‘… if any readers of this comment would care to chat about UNIVAC, I’d be delighted to hear from you. In particular, I’m looking for documentation on something called “Overdrive”, that modified a UNIVAC I to allow (under some circumstances) to have three instructions per word, rather than two. I can be reached at pzi@ingerman.org.’
I learned that Peter Zilahy Ingerman, PhD, was the donor of the Fortran II listing at The Smithsonian. Peter published a number of books and papers in the area of programming languages and compilers.
I called Peter and had a very pleasant conversation. It turned out he’d donated the Fortran materials to The Smithsonian a number of years ago, and did not remember that specific item I was interested in, but he volunteered to travel from his home in New Jersey to Washington if that would help.
Peter is very interested in the history of computing, and has created a very detailed UNIVAC I/II emulator, a machine that Peter wrote software for between 1957 and 1963. Peter told me of a UNIVAC web page maintained by Allan Reiter.
Update 2016/1/2: Updated URL for Allan Reiter’s UNIVAC web page.
Update 2024/05/07: Updated URL for Peter’s emulator. Peter passed away on June 21, 2020.