[TriEmbed] Need a PDP 11 of your own?

Wed Mar 4 15:43:34 CST 2020

Yet another happening at UConn in the 70s.

The DEC machines were in a lab owned by the EE department. The university
computer center had two machines, an IBM 360 Model 65, and an IBM 1620.
The 1620 was the first computer I programmed.  It originally had a paper
tape reader punch, which was removed to an IBM 1627 plotter, a version of a
Calcomp plotter.  I remember that you could plot from Fortran using the
PUNCH PAPER TAPE instruction.  We had a lunar orbiter game which used the
plotter and the four sense switches on the 1620 console to turn thrust on
and off and control it's direction.

The EE grad stunts coopted the paper tape reader punch and attempts to
interface it to the PDP-8 with plans to use it for a paper tape OS.  As I
recall they got it far enough to be able to start and stop the beast, but
gave up because they couldn't figure out how to slow it down so that the
data rate was slow enough for the PDP-8 to consume.

On Wed, Mar 4, 2020 at 3:35 PM Pete Soper <pete at soper.us> wrote:

> French to Googlish: "IT SEEMS THAT THE STRIPS OF PAPER ARE BLACK"
>
> The strangest paper tape episode I had was coming into a Uni lab after a
> weekend to find an ASR33 bolted to a wall below the ceiling. A giant loop
> of tape (ends taped together w overlapping sprocket holes) was fed through
> the reader. It was being used as a ROM with a computer that had no other
> memory apart from core.  I swear it's true. About 1973.
> Pete
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Rick DeNatale via TriEmbed <triembed at triembed.org>
> Date: 3/4/20 2:01 PM (GMT-05:00)
> To: Wft <wft at nc.rr.com>
> Cc: Triembed <triembed at triembed.org>
> Subject: Re: [TriEmbed] Need a PDP 11 of your own?
>
> Another anecdote from my college days in the early 1970s.
>
> One of the graduate students spent some time overseas in France.
>
> One day someone got a package from him containing a mysterious roll of
> paper tape which was black. I don’t think that any of us had seen such.
>
> So someone fed it into one of the teletypes and printed it, revealing the
> message:
>
> IL SEMBLE QICI LES BANDES DE PAPIER SOIENT NOIRES
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mar 3, 2020 at 9:23 PM, <Bill Trautman via TriEmbed
> <triembed at triembed.org>> wrote:
>
> I think I still have a Paper Tape for a PDP8 from a summer class I took at
> Lehigh University in 1978 as a rising Highschool Senior :-)
>
> On 3/2/2020 7:39 PM, Ken Boone via TriEmbed wrote:
>
> I think I have an original PDP 8 front panel at home.
>
> On Mon, Mar 2, 2020, 11:16 AM Rodney Radford via TriEmbed <
> triembed at triembed.org> wrote:
>
>> I am strongly considering buying one of these though...
>>
>>
>> https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/david-hansel/arduino-altair-8800-simulator-3594a6
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 2, 2020 at 10:46 AM Gregg Tracton via TriEmbed <
>> triembed at triembedorg <triembed at triembed.org>> wrote:
>>
>>> Everyone will want one of these!
>>>
>>> I used one of these computers in college.
>>>
>>> For those under the age of 50: to start up this gem, first introduced in
>>> the 1970's, you turn on the power and manually type in the 16 (or so)
>>> instructions that tell the machine to load the OS (operating system), using
>>> the toggle switches on the front. Yes, we were entering binary manually: it
>>> had no keyboard (or mouse) -- this part, plus a disk, is the whole machine
>>> [You could attach a terminal.]
>>>
>>> It took a few minutes to get that sequence right. Experienced users
>>> could do it in 20 seconds.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Mar 2, 2020 at 10:24 AM Mauricio Tavares via TriEmbed <
>>> triembed at triembed.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11-get-one
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
>>> --
>>> Gregg Tracton: tired, retired & inappropriately unattired (PJ's)
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-- 
Rick DeNatale

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