spent some time with 8-32kb PDP-11-style computer-like appliences, and it was fun
Back in the days of real computers.
I have the original KIM-1 manuals. But those are only old in terms of the PC. I am probably the only one here to have actually seen an old drum memory (albiet one sitting in storage in Room 100), or a mercury delay line.
--- Noel
Oh no, you're not :-) I have worked on real-time radar simulations on Honeywell DDP-516s with drum memory and paper tape, and PDP-11s with core memory. The interesting thing was that by the time I worked on it, the drums were so old we had to kick-start them after power-up...I mean literally "kick" start, until some enterprising lab-tech replaced it with a custom-designed all-semiconductor version. The final funny thing on that computer was that years later someone showed me an old Nieman-Marcus (a very exclusive department store in the U.S.) '70s Christmas Catalog where an orange DDP-516 was advertized as *the* "Kitchen Computer" for the space-age (this thing was the size of a large frdge).
Shash
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