about / sw-comp-history

About Software Wrighter's Computer History

A project family for rebuilding, explaining, and running historically important computing systems in modern browsers and Rust toolchains.

Project

Software Wrighter's Computer History collects live demos, emulators, assemblers, and language experiments around machines and workflows that shaped programming: APL terminals, IBM 1130 minicomputers, RCA CDP1802 microprocessors, IBM S/390 mainframe assembly, and card-era batch processing.

The goal is practical preservation. Each demo should be something you can open, run, inspect, and connect back to source code rather than a static screenshot or historical note.

Author

The work is maintained by Mike Wright as part of the broader Software Wrighter Lab set of projects. The lab blog covers AI coding agents, systems programming, language tooling, practical machine learning, and retrocomputing work as it is built. Read the bio.

Topics

  • APL\360
    Terminal-era array programming demos and historical language examples.
  • IBM 1130
    Minicomputer emulation, assembly tooling, console interfaces, and FORTH history.
  • RCA CDP1802
    COSMAC 1802 instruction execution, assembly, and period-style I/O devices.
  • IBM S/390
    Mainframe assembly demos and batch-processing workflows.

GitHub Organizations

Computer-history repositories live under sw-comp-history; related systems and language projects are split across focused Software Wrighter organizations.

hardwarewrighter

Hardware-related repositories for Software Wrighter projects.

software-wrighter-lab

Workshop repositories and supporting code for the Software Wrighter Lab blog.

sw-audio-viz

Audio and visualization libraries, tools, and experiments.

sw-cli-tools

Command-line tools for Software Wrighter workflows.

sw-comp-history

Computer-history and retrocomputing artifacts, demos, emulators, and historical toolchains.

sw-emacs

Emacs packages and editor-centered development experiments.

sw-embed

Embedded stacks, compilers, and browser demos around COR24 and related targets.

sw-fun

Fun projects, toys, prototypes, and experiments.

sw-game-dev

Games and game-development tools.

sw-langtools

Programming language tooling, parsers, compilers, interpreters, and experiments.

sw-ml-study

Machine-learning study projects, including practical model and training experiments.

sw-music-tools

Music composition, generation, and supporting creative tooling.

sw-vibe-coding

AI-agent and workflow projects used to build and maintain the larger ecosystem.

sw-video-tools

Command-line and web tools for AI video production.

sw-web-tools

Web tools and browser-facing utilities.