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Old 17th Jan 2017, 7:35 pm   #18
TonyDuell
Dekatron
 
Join Date: Jun 2015
Location: Biggin Hill, London, UK.
Posts: 5,191
Default Re: They don't come much more Vintage than this

By coincidence I am working on a late-ish PDP8 machine (PDP8/e) at the moment. So far I am doing battle to get the processor box mounted in the rack. Repairin the electronics, if it needs it, doesn't bother me at all.

I have the 'boot matrix' board in mine. A diode matrix ROM (I am not joking) that acts like the front panel amd loads the paper tape bootstrap into core. Means that starting up involves putting the loader tape into the reader and flipping one switch.

I am wondering what the 'washing machine size hard drive' was. PDP8 systems didn't generaly have large hard drives. The most common one (at least on later models) was the RK05, which is a single 6U rack unit taking a 14" disk cartridge which slides in through a door on the front. The cartridges were nicknamed 'pizzas' and the drives 'pizza ovens for obvious reasons.

I can't understand this modern very high level programming either. I'm a hardware guy. I think in terms of gates and flip-flops. Machine code is fine. Microcode (one level below machine code) is even better (and yes I have written microcode both in assembler and binary). I've never formally done any of it though (I failed computer studies O-level the only O-level I did fail).
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