Are there any remotely accessible PC or XT on the internet?

[jafir]

Does anyone know if there are any remotely accessible PC or XT (or clones) on the internet?

I’ve seen a few emulators, but so far no real hardware.

I’d imagine it wouldn’t be too hard these days. An IP KVM, an AT to XT keyboard converter and maybe VGA card or one of the RGBi to VGA or HDMI converters out there.

If someone wanted to get fancy, you could have an internet accessible locally hosted FTP site that the XT could get to either with a network card or even a serial port or modem with a phone line emulator so that remote users could upload their own software to the HDD. I’ve even seen IP power strips/pdu so you could power cycle it if things got locked up solid.

 

[mbbrutman]

What would be the point of doing this?

 

[jafir]

So that someone that doesn’t have one could access one and play around is what I was thinking. Kind of like people that have put VMS or zOS systems on the internet, only to a much smaller scale.

 

[Krille]

IIRC, reenigne had something like this at one time. Not sure if he is still running it. Search the forum for more info.

 

[tradde]

Not sure how much you could really do this way. VMS and zOS are operating systems designed for users to access. I don't see the point of trying to access an XT or similar.

 

[reenigne]

Yes, see http://www.reenigne.org/xtserver . It's not interactive at the moment (that's something planned for the future) but you can upload a floppy image with DOS, the program you want to run, and an AUTOEXEC.BAT to run it. There are interrupt handlers set up to do things like take screenshots, record audio and send back files. The intended audience is emulator authors really but it's open to anyone.

 

[dhau]

What would be the point of doing this?

I guess like with hacked baby monitors, you want some random stranger to threaten you using your own vintage PC.

 

[Exceter]

It's not a PC/XT(though its performance is comparable to one) but you can telnet into this: http://homebrewcpu.com/

 

[whartung]

A while ago a guy had an IMSAI (pretty sure it was an IMSAI) on the internet. It had one or two floppy drives.

What made it interesting was that it also had a live feed on YouTube (and there was a chat on that channel). Folks were given 15m at a time on it.

The two takeaways from that experience was that you got a better feel for what it was like to be on such a machine, especially how slow it was, particularly the floppy drives.

But, also, it was fun because there were some POKEs that could drive the LED front panel of the machine, which made for some fun little programs that you'd type in over telnet and see "live" on the video stream.

Being in the presence of the machine is something that the simulators don't convey well. Few things like the light and mechanical awakening of writing to a floppy, or seeking on the hard disk.

The modern Z80s with their flash hardware I find pretty sterile -- may as well run a simulator.