The MIT Lincoln Laboratory TX-2 computer was the successor to the Lincoln TX-0 and was known for its role in advancing both artificial intelligence and human–computer interaction. Wesley A. Clark was the chief architect of the TX-2.
-- from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TX-2.
We're building a simulator for the TX-2 machine. To do this, we need documentation and, if we can discover some, example code. If you know of documentation which is not linked from our documentation page, please let us know.
Our most pressing need is for authentic TX-2 software; without software to run the simulator will not be very useful, and without authentic software, we cannot be confident that the simulation is accurate.
You can try out an online demo. This is still a work-in-progress; many parts are incomplete.
The source code for the simulator is on github. You can use this to run the simulator locally. See the build instructions for the web-based simulator.
We'd like to make it possible once more to run the historically important Sketchpad program by Ivan Sutherland.
Sketchpad was a pioneering work in Human-Computer Interaction, computer graphics and computer-aided design. The graphical user interface and object-oriented programming were both pioneered by Sketchpad. Sketchpad also made use of constraints for manipulating the elements of the drawing.
Ivan Sutherland received the Turing Award in 1988 and the Kyoto Prize in 2012.
We've collected some links here:
Other places to look for related information include:
- The Computer History Museum's collections
- The Lincoln Laboratory Archive (this is not open to the public)
- MIT's Distinctive Collections
- UMN's TX-2 and related collections in the Charles Babbage Institute archives.
Please email [email protected].