On Wednesday, December 9, 2020 at 10:11:01 AM UTC-5 [email protected] wrote:
> Ah, the pdp-8, a trip down memory lane. I used an 8i extensively in the > early 70s, but did not make the acquaintance of TECO. After looking it up > on Wikipedia, I' m glad I didn't. Remember how 3 ascii characters were > packed into two 12-bit words? And while the 8e may have come with 12k of > RAM, the 8i came with 4k, unless you had the money to get the extension to > 8k (which ours had). > Some of TECO's ugliness has to do with the media it supported, including (if I recall correctly) paper tape(!). I used it with files on floppy disk, fortunately for me. The 8/e I used had two ASR-33 teletypes and two (two!) eight-inch floppy disk drives, using disks which held 250KB if I recall. We used OS/8 for single-user computing with access to the disk drives, and a time-sharing BASIC for two-user computing with paper tape for program storage. One of our projects was to modify a time-sharing BASIC with support for DEC's floppy disk drive unit to work with the third-party drive unit we used; after several years of work by us high school students, we figured out that the BASIC depended on the interrupts generated by DEC's floppy controller; the third-party unit used programmed I/O, and could not generate interrupts! Ah, nostalgia. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/c6f5bd5e-ead6-4e36-8682-67b55176ecf5n%40googlegroups.com.
