My first "personal computer" was a PDP-8i at Georgia Tech in the late 1960's. The ISy school had one in a small room in the basement with an ASR TTY (33 I think). There was another room with at least one more TTY with punch and you would code on that machine and after signing up for time on the PDP-8i you would take your paper tape in and after toggling in the boot sequence and loading the BIN tape then the Assembler you would run your tape to punch out your assembled program to run on the machine. I may be leaving out a number of steps since that was a while back.
in any case that was my first taste of writing any code in a machines assembly language and even then I dreamed of having my very own PDP-8.
This is a cool project and even for an Old Man I can fully relate to why it was done. I think this experience led to a life long career working with computers ranging from Big Iron mainframes to PC's networks and a variety of internal and Internet facing Servers. Yes, even though retired, I have a couple of Arduinos and Raspberry Pi's around to play with! Learning new things has kept me going all these years.
We had a PDP-8i in my high school in 1977. I think it had 4 or 8K RAM. I remember manually toggling in the bootstrap code on those front panel switches (7737, 3377, etc) before the paper tape would load in the ASR-33 teletype. We had a choice of two languages: Basic or FOCAL. After loading Basic, you had about one or two typed pages of memory left for writing your program, which you could then save on the paper tape.
After basic started up, you could choose not to load the floating point support. That w
"A mind is a terrible thing to have leaking out your ears."
-- The League of Sadistic Telepaths
Fond Memories (Score:5, Interesting)
in any case that was my first taste of writing any code in a machines assembly language and even then I dreamed of having my very own PDP-8.
This is a cool project and even for an Old Man I can fully relate to why it was done. I think this experience led to a life long career working with computers ranging from Big Iron mainframes to PC's networks and a variety of internal and Internet facing Servers. Yes, even though retired, I have a couple of Arduinos and Raspberry Pi's around to play with! Learning new things has kept me going all these years.
Re: (Score:0)
We had a PDP-8i in my high school in 1977. I think it had 4 or 8K RAM. I remember manually toggling in the bootstrap code on those front panel switches (7737, 3377, etc) before the paper tape would load in the ASR-33 teletype. We had a choice of two languages: Basic or FOCAL. After loading Basic, you had about one or two typed pages of memory left for writing your program, which you could then save on the paper tape.
After basic started up, you could choose not to load the floating point support. That w