A developer has resurrected IBM's 1963-era 1620 mainframe as a piece of software you can run in a browser tab.
The project, posted to GitHub under the username pkimpel and named retro-1620, recreates the IBM 1620 computer along with IPL-V, a piece of system software also dating to 1963. It runs client-side, so using it requires nothing more than a browser tab: no downloads, no vintage hardware, no operating system to configure. The repository made its way to Hacker News, where it picked up a modest seven points and two comments.
That's a small audience, but the project fits a familiar pattern in software preservation: hobbyists rebuilding old machines as code so they survive past the hardware that ran them. Unlike a museum piece behind glass, a browser emulator lets anyone actually run the thing, poke at IPL-V, load a program, and see how computing worked before most of us were born.
It's not going to replace your laptop, and its ambitions clearly aren't commercial. But as a piece of digital archaeology, that's exactly the point: the value isn't in doing something new, it's in keeping something old usable.