Refers to emulations of way-behind-the-state-of-the-art hardware or
software, or implementations of never-was-state-of-the-art; esp. if
such implementations are elaborate practical jokes and/or parodies,
written mostly for {hack value}, of more `serious' designs. Perhaps
the most widely distributed retrocomputing utility was the pnch(6) or
bcd(6) program on V7 and other early Unix versions, which would
accept up to 80 characters of text argument and display the
corresponding pattern in {punched card} code. Other well-known
retrocomputing hacks have included the programming language
{INTERCAL}, a {JCL}-emulating shell for Unix, the
card-punch-emulating editor named 029, and various elaborate {PDP-11}
hardware emulators and RT-11 OS emulators written just to keep an
old, sourceless {Zork} binary running.
A tasty selection of retrocomputing programs are made available at
the Retrocomputing Museum, http://www.catb.org/retro/.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {COME FROM}{hacker humor}{TECO}{Zork}]