This is a pretty faithful Plexus system emulator. It runs more or less in real time, meaning things may take a while. If you get stuck, try the following:

• The emulator needs to download a hard disk image before it runs. If all you see is a black screen, check if your browser is still loading.
• If all you see is 'PLEXUS SELFTEST REV 3.3', the Plexus is running its selftest. This will take about 30 seconds, or you can abort it by typing a '!' character.
• If you're at the 'PLEXUS PRIMARY BOOT REV 1.2' prompt, the Plexus is waiting for you to do something. Try pressing enter to boot Unix.
• If you run 'init 2', you need to login. Try user 'root' with no password.
• If you get weird colored blocks in the terminal, please allow using canvas image data for this site. There probably is an icon for that in the address bar.
• Hard disk changes are saved to local storage in your browser. Changing computers or browsers will clear it. Your browser may also clear the storage when it's unused for a long time or your (physical) machine is running low on hard disk space.

This is an emulator for a Plexus P/20 system, which is an Unix server from the '80's. It runs SystemV Unix on a dual 68010 processor mainboard. Adrian Black (from Adrian's Digital Basement) did some videos on the topic of getting one to work: 1 2 3 4 5.

This emulator is written in C. While it can be ran as a native program, the version you're looking at right now is compiled to webassembly using Emscripten. It uses xterm.js for the fancy terminal, which is connected to Emscripten via xterm-pty.

Plexus emulator © 2024 Sprite_tm and contributors. Licensed under the MIT license. Source code for this emulator is on Github.