...so that you can wire up more MSI TTL to add instructions or other features. That's the charm of the old-school PDP-8. (Okay, not the really old-school DTL version, but the version I remember in a friend's dorm room...)
by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Friday March 27, 2015 @02:43PM (#49356411)
How does it boot? I hope it's the real way, with toggle switches (you had to load a program to get it to bootstrap itself). I spent many wasted times booting these things up. Magic incantations and/or curses were optional, but became almost mandatory after a while.
You toggle in a few instructions to get it to load in your operating system, or compiler, off the high speed paper tape reader. In my case while in college, it was to load the FOCAL time sharing system, so three or four of us could write and run programs at ASR-33 teletype terminals.
A friend of mine was able to pick up a cheap used PDP-8 in the 1990s with many of the bells and whistles (paper tape reader/writer & teletype, etc), and a full set of software. I remember toggling in the bootstrap loader to start the whole bootstrapping of the operating system. Ah...memories.
As a computer, I find your faith in technology amusing.
Gotta call out lots of the internals in parallel.. (Score:3)
...so that you can wire up more MSI TTL to add instructions or other features. That's the charm of the old-school PDP-8. (Okay, not the really old-school DTL version, but the version I remember in a friend's dorm room...)
Re:Gotta call out lots of the internals in paralle (Score:0)
How does it boot? I hope it's the real way, with toggle switches (you had to load a program to get it to bootstrap itself). I spent many wasted times booting these things up. Magic incantations and/or curses were optional, but became almost mandatory after a while.
Re: Gotta call out lots of the internals in parall (Score:1)
You toggle in a few instructions to get it to load in your operating system, or compiler, off the high speed paper tape reader. In my case while in college, it was to load the FOCAL time sharing system, so three or four of us could write and run programs at ASR-33 teletype terminals.
Re: (Score:2)
A friend of mine was able to pick up a cheap used PDP-8 in the 1990s with many of the bells and whistles (paper tape reader/writer & teletype, etc), and a full set of software. I remember toggling in the bootstrap loader to start the whole bootstrapping of the operating system. Ah...memories.