I'm a serious PDP-8 fan myself. I learned my most basic computer skills in High School on a PDP-8, and my managerial skills bloomed as I learned how to talk the school into buying more hardware to play with during my time there.
I played with the PDP-8e simulator at: http://www.bernhard-baehr.de/pdp8e/pdp8e.html a few months ago when I first heard about it. It had emulation going well enough for me to boot into ETOS. Boy was I surprised how much I could just do from memory in Focal, OS/8, BASIC, ETOS and PAL-8. That stuff is DEEP inside me. Alas, I'd sent my old ETOS source listing to the shredder a couple years ago, so I couldn't just dive in and debug the bizarre behavior I was getting. The PiDP-8 hardware on offer at http://obsolescence.wix.com/obsolescence#!pidp-8/cbie is an interesting hybrid: It is emulated on Rasberry Pi hardware. The kit is sort of a 1/2 scale PDP 8i front panel. The emulation is of a PDP-8e INCLUDING the ETOS hardware. Even though it's not one pure thing, I have to say that it's what I would have built: The PDP 8i "butterfly" switches were the best front panel switches of anything. (Although I never learned the "flash flip" technique that the REAL gurus I studied under had.) The PDP 8e has the richest hardware and instruction set -- well actually the PDP 8a, which I believe had a further advance to extended memory to speak 128K of 12-bit words instead of the previous all-time high of 32K. (But I was an 8e guy so my memory of 8a lore is suspect.) I'm SORELY tempted to enqueue myself for the next run of kits, even though I really should be focusing on the future not the past... -Bill Cattey On Feb 18, 2016, at 12:03 PM, Bill Horne <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2/18/2016 11:03 AM, Bill Ricker wrote: >> >> On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 12:27 AM, Bill Horne <[email protected] >> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: >> >> Bill, who thinks that loading FOCAL from paper tape is the true >> test of computer wizardry! >> >> >> I guess i was pampered, the EDUSYS on which i ran FOCAL had a tiny boot >> drive (and DECtape). It also had FORTRAN II, the one with the ternary-branch >> IF. >> >> (Rumor was this higher-end EDUSYS was actually a PDP-11 under the hood, >> unlike the lower end EDUSYS educational-discount PDP-8's. One had 3 ASR-33 s >> attached, and the 32k memorey was in two banks, so it was assigned 6k ROM, >> 10K tty0, 8K+8K tty1+2; except the day i got in first and booted it so TTY0 >> got all the high bank 16k and the other tty's got 5k each. The T.A. was >> bemused and noted which projects had so few comments they still fit in 5k.) > > I did my first Assembler course on a PDP-8 Edusystem at UMass-Boston in 1977. > Those were the days! > > I was offered a job on the west coast, and I gave away my 8" floppy to a > friend. Wish I'd kept it. Come to think of it, I have a case of 5.25" > floppies somewhere - amazing what you find when you're moving. Anyone > interested? > > Bill, who had to shovel snow last month. > > -- > Bill Horne > 828-678-1548 > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
