Emulating the Fred Machine
Brian Foley · 2003
The APM, or Fred Machine, was an experimental networked workstation designed by the University of Edinburgh Department of Computer Science in the early 1980s. Development continued throughout the 1980s, with many hardware components and a large collection of software being added until the system was decommissioned in the early 1990s. Even though only 60 or so of the machines were ever built[5], it is instructive to examine the design decisions behind both the hardware and software. As a whole, the system has some interesting strengths and weaknesses, and in some ways was very much ahead of its time. In 2001, as a 4th year project, Cristopher Lisle wrote a partial emulation of the Fred Machine and the networked filestore. This project extends this work by improving the emulation and by researching in further detail the hardware and software that made up the system.