We’ve often thought that it must be harder than ever to learn about computers. Every year, there’s more to learn, so instead of making the gentle slope from college mainframe, to Commodore 64, to IBM PC, to NVidia supercomputer, you have to start at the end. But, really, you don’t. You can always emulate computers from simpler times, and even if you don’t need to, it can be a lot of fun.
That’s the idea behind the MonTana mini-computer. It combines “…ideas from the PDP-11, MIPS, Scott CPU, Game Boy, and JVM to make a relatively simple 16-bit computer…”
The computer runs on Java, so you can try it nearly anywhere. The console is accessed through a web browser and displays views of memory, registers, and even something that resembles a Game Boy screen. You’ll need to use assembly language until you write your own high-level language (we’d suggest Forth). There is, however, a simple operating system, MTOS.
This is clearly made for use in a classroom, and we’d love to teach a class around a computer like this. The whole thing reminds us of a 16-bit computer like the PDP-11 where everything is a two-byte word. There are only 4K bytes of memory (so 2K words). However, you can accomplish a great deal in that limited space. Thanks to the MTOS API, you don’t have to worry about writing text to the screen and other trivia.
It looks like fun. Let us know what you’ll use it for. If you want to go down a level, try CARDIAC. Or skip ahead a little, and teach kids QBasic.
