Any old PDP-11 or PDP-8 hackers here?

[benburch]

Just having a nostalgic moment here... Any other old timers around?

[bemildred]

1. PDP-11 RSTS/E?

SYS calls and TKB? Teco?
I spent several years at that.
That is for really old timers though.

[benburch]

3. TECO!!!

I remember TECO! It ran on the PDP-8 too.

[qnr]

2. Yeah, PDP-11s for a while. You should visit irc.freenode.net, channel

#classiccmp -- it is packed with people that still build and code on them, and almost any other system you can think of.

[benburch]

4. Cool!

Thanks for the pointer!

[qnr]

6. Please note that it took me until now to come up with an "As opposed

to new PDP hackers" thought.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled forum browsing.

[papau]

5. Does PDP-1 count?

It was rather neat to see memory as binary on screen back then - and to be able to change it bit by bit! And to pause and resume a program from just about anywhere. Those Harvard boys sure had a neat toy! It was my first "personal" computer! Even had a FORTRAN 1 compliler! And in addition to the native assemby lanuage it had a Fortran assemby language, if my memory is not getting confused, that was called FAP.

:toast:

:-)

[ConsAreLiars]

7. No, just a PDP-8 user.

Of course, that meant writing programs to translate math formulas for simple things like analysis of variance and correlations into Fortran IV(?) and constructing input routines and output formats that were usable. A lot less trouble than using the mechanical calculator, with whirring gears and spinning cylinders for the same task - given the amount of data that would have been impossible actually without a small army of keypunchers. I discovered that while chasing down typos was fun in a way, it was something I'd rather avoid.

[longship]

8. Cut my teeth on a pdp.

Learned assembler on a pdp/lsi-11. Also, did a lot of work at Boeing on PDP-11's. Great systems.

My favorite old computer was the Dec System 10. This was a very cool machine. It had real core memory (non-volatile). When the damned thing would crash your programs would still be running when it was brought back up. Very cool machine.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

9. The oldest computer in which I did anything was a Burroughs B6900

Either that, or a TRS-80 Model I, or an Apple ][. I don't know which one is older.

[longship]

10. Burroughs B5500

I learned computing on a Burroughs B5500! Vacuum tubes in the power supply!

I loved CANDE terminal system. It sure was better than all those punch cards. We still had to use cards, but I used CANDE to make changes and submit jobs. Burroughs job control was a lot easier than stupid IBM JCL which was a mystery even to old pros. I also worked on B6600, B6900 and IBM System 370.

However, my great love has always been mini-computers. The DEC machines were cool, esp the Dec System-10. But I also did a lot of numerical stuff on a heavily modified Harris /6 which would regularly beat the PDPs' butts (bit slice chip-based CPU--20 bit word--with HW floating point).

It's amazing how much computing power we have today in comparison. Here I am with a twin core 64 bit machine which, in the day, would have been a super computer. Hell, back then a big machine had a few MB of storage using huge disk packs shared amongst many users. Now, I've got the better part of a TB in one box all to myself.

It's fun to think about how cool we thought that old big iron was. We could not have imagined what the next 30 years would bring.

[longship]

11. PDP-11 and... wait for it... DEC System-10

The System-10 was totally awesome. It had ****core**** memory. You could turn the whole damned thing off and when you powered it back up, all the stuff would still be in memory. It could pick up and run programs right where they left off.

The DECSystem-10 has the dubious distinction as the machine on which the original "Adventure" game was written and played. "You are in a maze of twisty little passages all alike."

[hunter]

12. Check out Doug Jones' PDP-8 site...

http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/pdp8

(Yeah, he's the voting & elections guy too.)

[MazeRat7]

13. Yes, I actually built an 11/73 from "extra" boards we had laying around...

Had to order the cage, RL floppy/removable disk, power supply etc....

That was around 1984 I think.... ???

MZr7

[Dogmudgeon]

14. Yep ... with Digital FOCAL, too

I was a kid at the time, but it changed my life.

It was like my first girlfriend. Good times, good times. I never looked back.

Okay, I'm lying. I looked back lots of times. Like now, slowly breaking two decades of Microsoft bondage. (And they just killed off MONO, too.)

It was quite the cool world, though.

--p!