[TriEmbed] Need a PDP 11 of your own?

Wed Mar 4 18:29:15 CST 2020

Our lab had disk races! The massive disk drives, the size of a washing
machine, were intentionally spun off-center (sped up differentially),
causing them to scuttle across the floor.  First disk across the room wins!
  Not a coincidence that folks who studied dynamic spin harmonics (a
physics topic) usually won.

-g

On Wed, Mar 4, 2020 at 4:43 PM Rick DeNatale via TriEmbed <
triembed at triembed.org> wrote:

> 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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>>
>> _______________________________________________ Triangle, NC Embedded
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>
> --
> Rick DeNatale
>
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Gregg Tracton: tired, retired & inappropriately unattired (PJ's)
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