PDP8

Any stories, collections or recollections of the earliest days of computers
or related projects
Stew
Posts: 495
Joined: 02 Mar 2018, 10:21
Location: Staindrop, Darlington.

PDP8

Post by Stew »

Hi all.
Just thought some of you may like this?
This chap has designed a PDP8 replica (amongst others) to run off a Raspberry Pi. He sells them as kits too. I'm pretty much foaming at the mouth for one of these.

http://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-8
GarydNB
Posts: 282
Joined: 15 Feb 2018, 23:12

Re: PDP8

Post by GarydNB »

It's very nice....what is it?
Stew
Posts: 495
Joined: 02 Mar 2018, 10:21
Location: Staindrop, Darlington.

Re: PDP8

Post by Stew »

We're very pleased you did Phil!
Tobe
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Joined: 16 Feb 2018, 06:19
Location: Varberg or Stockholm, Sweden

Re: PDP8

Post by Tobe »

I remember it but never learned on it :-( despite my efforts it never worked out for me! It was a mandatory course when I was in university and still today I can't figure out how I passed that exam!
Cheers,

Tobe
Stew
Posts: 495
Joined: 02 Mar 2018, 10:21
Location: Staindrop, Darlington.

Re: PDP8

Post by Stew »

It appeals to me for the same reason I love retro RC. Lots of buttons and switches!
I grew up in the 70s and 80s with lots of blinking light computers on Dr Who, movies like 'Wargames' and so on, then pratting around with BASIC on the BBC Micro at school, and Acorn Electron at home, and eventually went to work in S&T for British Rail where I learned about the innards of computers, chips, logic gates, and many other baffling things, then joined the Fire Service and promptly forgot the lot.
Now in my mid 40's I find myself installing endless different flavours of Linux (Finally settled on Trisquel) on my Laptop and Desktop, playing with Emacs, Lisp, Python, BASIC (again) and so on, along with messing about with Arduino, and now discovering retro computing.
I still know nowt, but it's harmless fun and a fascinating hobby. Has there ever been a better time for the hobby room tinkerer?
Martin
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Joined: 16 Feb 2018, 14:11
Location: Warwickshire

Re: PDP8

Post by Martin »

I never did PDP8 or PDP11. First programming I did at college was FORTRAN or BASIC where you had to submit your program on a stack of punched cards, and then you got your results back the following day on wide printer paper (the stuff with the tractor holes and the light green bars ruled across it).

Then I moved on to Commodore PET - first in BASIC and later 6502 machine code, and eventually assembler. Then also a bunch of other microprocessors: Z80, 6809, ...

Much cheaper to get into it nowadays, but I think a lot of youngsters are put off by the power and complexity of modern computers - even the small cheap ones. It was fairly easy to get a total understanding of early computer architecture and memorize the complete instruction sets of the processors.

Even something as simple as a cheap 8-bit Arduino, when you consider all its built-in interfaces, is more complicated than early minicomputers or microcomputers - and more powerful then a lot of them!

Something like a Raspberry Pi is so complicated that no single person in the whole world has complete knowledge about all its hardware and operating system.
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Shaun
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Joined: 15 Feb 2018, 21:49
Location: West Yorkshire

Re: PDP8

Post by Shaun »

Punch cards.. I remember once a fellow student peed me off by pinching part of a program I wrote so when he went off to lunch, I modified a number of his cards with a knife blade, cutting some new holes. Took him 2 weeks to sort it out as we had to take the cards from our college up to the uni to run them and we could only do this twice a week. Sweet revenge.. :lol:

Shaun
Stew
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Joined: 02 Mar 2018, 10:21
Location: Staindrop, Darlington.

Re: PDP8

Post by Stew »

Phil_G wrote: 06 Jan 2019, 00:52 Anyone remember Whiz Kids? Ritchie with his computer Ralf solving all manner of problems and situations and so many 'house' jokes . There are some episodes on youtube.
Whiz Kids! Crikey Phil, I had to go down some dusty corridors and open some creaky doors in my brain to find the place where that one was filed!
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Igull
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Joined: 16 Feb 2018, 21:11

Re: PDP8

Post by Igull »

Just found this thread :-)
I can't believe anyone in their right mind would wish to re-build one of these items created by the devil incarnate :-)
I'm probably scarred for life having designed and built ATE (automatic test equipment) using these things in the mid 70's and early 80's. I can still feel the wrath of the idiotic production supervisor that kept feeding the RK05 disk drives with all the system and backup disks saying 'I've tried all the disks in the drive and the stupid system STILL won't boot' - only to find that the heads had crashed and ALL the production disks AND backup discs had been trashed - the platens looked like the rings of saturn - just an f word nightmare :-)
Even worse, these things were put into service by the military (not the sharpest lot on the planet) - I did get a number of nice free trips to various climes to sort out the issues though :-)
I think we tend to have a rose tinted view of stuff from our recent (?) past, I for one am quite happy to see all of those things dumped in a skip and set fire to LOL. TBH, I probably have a long list of items like that.
Maybe someone 30 years from now will say that about 2.4g radio - or maybe even Phil's encoders LOL :D :D :D :D :D
Neil
Spike S
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Joined: 16 Feb 2018, 14:59
Location: Salisbury UK

Re: PDP8

Post by Spike S »

Igull wrote: 06 Jan 2019, 20:58 ...
Even worse, these things were put into service by the military (not the sharpest lot on the planet) ...
Neil
Steady, Neil.
I would agree with you - but we would probably both then be wrong. The "not very sharp" chaps were sometimes singularly unimpressed by our equipment suppliers!
Probably all comes under the heading:
"It seemed like a good idea at the time" (offering some hope of reaching a firing solution a little sooner than the cabinet full of mechanical ball resolvers)

"Engineer" = The chap who not only knows where to hit it but also exactly how hard to hit it.
Spike S
(Tune for maximum smoke)
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