Subject line says it all. The Lambda uses this as its disk controller and
it's looking like the one in mine needs some debugging. There doesn't seem
to be any documentation for this controller out there. There are docs for
the Interphase SMD 2180 on Bitsavers but it appears to be a very different
board.
Thanks!
Josh
> From: Neil Thompson <albiorix at gmail.com>
>
> I'm convinced that Dijksta (and anyone else who came out with similar
> comments were full of horseshit. In my opinion, it's the ability to
> translate a real world "thing" into an algorithm that is the essense of
> programming, and anyone who has managed to learn (particularly on their
> own, as many of us did) that ability has learned something that transcends
> the language (or tool) you use to implement the algorithm.
There's definitely truth to this. The main thing that makes a good
programmer isn't memorization of language features or syntax, it's
good mental organization and thinking habits; the ability and practice
of really *thinking through* the steps involved in solving a problem,
building a solid mental model of the relevant data structures and
algorithms, and then breaking those down into component steps until
one arrives at a suitable representation in native-language
operations. If someone has a good understanding of that, they can
apply it (with varying amounts of blood, sweat, and tears) in any
language; if they don't, there's no language in the world that can
impart it to them (no matter *what* the flavor-of-the-decade Savior Of
All Programming Forever is - "Try Swift! It's the new Pascal!")
*That said,* there are definitely some languages that are more
conducive to building these habits than others (and, within each
group, many that emphasize different aspects more or less strongly.) I
can't speak to COBOL as I've never had cause to get any experience
with it, but I would say that BASIC (as in, the old-school,
unstructured BASICs of the Bad Old Days) really does teach you a bunch
of habits that you end up needing to un-learn as soon as you start
working with better languages (not even *newer* languages - ALGOL and
Lisp both predate it.)
Line-#-and-GOTO programming imposes the same burden of bookkeeping and
space-management on the programmer as direct machine-code monitor
hacking and the most primitive assemblers, but without any rational
explanation as to why, so that any novice attempting to create a
program of any real complexity ends up being instilled with a
superstitious dread over the ludicrous non-question of where to put
things - do I space statements N numbers apart? What if I need to add
more than N-1 intervening statements later!? Should I place my
subroutines on even 1000s for easy reference? Will the line numbers
even go high enough!? - the lack of scoped/local variables or any
parameter-passing mechanism for GOSUB makes any non-trivial
modularization nearly impossible, and the READ/DATA structure is just
flat-out demented.
And all that mental exhaustion *before* the newbie even gets to the
*real* challenges of learning to program!
Now, Dijkstra was a self-important ponce given to wild all-or-nothing
proclamations and manifestos (manifestes? Manifesti?) and even if we
give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that his statements
quoted here were meant tongue-in-cheek they're still pretty
ridiculous. And God knows the Appointed Language Messiah in that great
holy war, Pascal, was its own special breed of Hell for novices and
experts alike (array size as type qualifier? Just kill me now...) And
it's definitely true that plenty of people can and did learn to
program in BASIC and still went on to learn better and do Good Things
down the line. But there absolutely are such things as bad programming
languages.
On Apr 6, 2020, at 10:00 AM, cctalk-request at classiccmp.org wrote:
>
> They play with the
> pennies to discover that they can roll around, and learn that they're not
> food or nasal suppositories,
I was with you up till here, but wait, what?
I?m one of those kids who was just the right age.
Five years older and I would have been in the Car Club, and would have ended up being a damn good mechanic without a lot of career opportunities.
Five years later and not every damn computer on the planet would have come with a BASIC interpreter in ROM and who knows what my tinkering instinct would have led to.
But I, born in 1971, had an Atari 2600 and its BASIC programming cartridge, and in the fall on 1982 I got a VIC-20, and sometime in 1983 my parent bought me an Apple //e.
So I did grow up with Microsoft BASIC as my first language, and, sure, it doesn?t lend itself well to structured programming, but then when I wanted to know ?well how do you do _that_?? I ended up in 6502 assembly, and picked up P-System PASCAL and Logo along the way. Then in the summer of ?89 I interned in a physics department, and got OK at Turbo Pascal and sort-of-vaguely-able-to-write C.
College brought REXX on (IBM VM/CMS; I didn?t get an Amiga until the 2010s, well after its relevance) and Perl and Scheme and SPARC assembly, and grad school (both for irrelevant degrees: Ancient Mediterranean Civilization and History?but wait, there?s a footnote) 680x0 assembly and Java. (The footnote is, well history of computing, so I got a lot of deep-dive stuff into other languages and architectures.) Since then, whatever I needed to learn when I needed to learn it. I?ve programmed COBOL for money, which has joined the ranks of things I?m not super-proud to have done for money but hey it paid the bills when I needed it.
Since then?Python, C, Go, TypeScript, whatever was needed. These days it?s mostly Python.
But really what it was was that I was lucky enough to be in that small age window where computers were, one the one hand, something middle-class families could afford while still being capable of doing cool things, and on the other hand, simple enough that a smart adolescent could pretty much understand them more-or-less in their entirety.
Adam
At 16:12 05-04-20, you wrote:
>On 4/5/20 6:28 PM, geneb via cctalk wrote:
>>On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, Neil Thompson via cctalk wrote:
>>
>>>I'm convinced that Dijksta (and anyone else who came out with similar
>>>comments were full of horseshit.? In my opinion, it's the ability to
>>>translate a real world "thing" into an algorithm that is the essense of
>>>programming, and anyone who has managed to learn (particularly on their
>>>own, as many of us did) that ability has learned something that transcends
>>>the language (or tool) you use to implement the algorithm.? When I first
>>>started programming professionally, we had "programmers" (or sometimes
>>>designers) who specified the algorithms and "coders" who implemented them.
>>>That never worked well
>>Yep.? You can write horrible code in /any/ language. ;)
>>BTW, I scanned & uploaded this last week.? Oddly relevant.
>>https://archive.org/details/cobolcodingform
>
>I still have lots of them. And Printer Output Forms. And Fortran
>Programming Forms. And all kinds of other Programming forms. And
>Flow Chart Forms. You know all that stuff we actually used to
>engineer programs before the software engineers came along and said
>we were all doing wrong.
>
>bill
Ran into a bunch of my FORTRAN programs from over
50 years ago as well as the obligatory flowcharts
I would do first before writing a single line of
code. Code written in pencil so could erase
errors and only then would I use a keypunch for
final version. Also a few FORTRAN coding
forms. Back then, with sometimes a 48 hour delay
between submitting my card deck and getting
program output, it was well worth spending an
hour or two to print out contents of cards and
carefully check that there weren't missing commas
and or other errors that would mean correcting
the stupid mistake and resubmitting ones card deck.
Never got into COBOL as my main interest was
real-time computing and so next step up was
access to PDP-8 which had FOCAL and quickly
learned that programming in assembler was the way
to go. Still like assembly language programming
and suspect my early experience of learning to
code in an environment where there wasn't really
a dividing line between software and hardware
(people would build custom boards for
PDP-8's/PDP-11's to speed up data acquisition)
that the biggest change I made in my programming
style was to switch to VB as it allowed me to
easily create the graphical interface I needed
but still let me link to C or Assembler routines
in my VB6 code until windoze became too locked
down to be of any use. Still haven't got all my
VB6 programs running under Wine on Linux but at least Linux has FORTRAN and C.
Part of what I've noticed is that I can't sit
down at a keyboard and write code (as one is
supposed to do nowadays) and it turns into a
total mess. I still use flowcharts when I'm
dealing with tricky code and the nice thing about
flowcharts is that one can easily create a
hardware state machine from them. Was nice in
1970's, but now a Propeller chip, even using
interperted Spin code, works far faster than the
TTL state machines I used to make. Other
paleo-programmer related deficits include being
totally unable to use RDB and still make use of
linked lists and hash tables to create my
databases as have been doing this for 50
years. Software Tools was probably the most
important book I read in 1983 as it got me out of
my rut of writing a massive FORTRAN program to do
a specific task that I'd have no idea how to
modify even 6 months later to small useful tools
that could be strung together. Back then
engineers I worked with would have total disdain
for Comp-Sci types who would still be working out
their code indentation scheme while we would
already be using a quickly written throwaway
program to perform a particular task.
The other thing I should bring up is that my wife
is after me to get rid of a lot of my old
books. While rumaging through the attic of my
shop found boxes of old computer books which I'd
like to keep but have been told that if I haven't
looked at them in 15 years that it's unlikely I
will in future. Will check in see if some of
them have been scanned onto bitsavers or other
sites but have 68000 programming books, 6502 and
other microprocessor related books as well as
lots of Mac books when I just had to get into the
guts of a Mac to do what I wanted. Have a number
of PDP-11 Unibus cards which likely won't use and
will have to get all of that sorted out. Once
have a list of what I've got will post it on my
web site. I live in Kamloops, BC if there's
anyone on this list who lives close by who's interested.
A few hours ago I started looking at three "smart" light switches that
need LEDs replaced, and switched on the soldering iron, and ... nope.
It's a Weller WP80 and it seems the sensor in the heating element has
died. I discovered that only after resetting and then dismantling the
control unit to check it out with a DVM, of course.
Clearly I need either a new WP80 element, or a new soldering iron. I
could get a WSP80 for far less than the cost of a new element for the
WP80, but I'd get the element faster. So which, if any, is the better
iron? What would you guys do?
I begrudge paying UKP 92 for a new element. That's the cheapest I could
find -- /half/ the most expensive price -- but just seems ludicrously
extortionate for what amounts to a piece of swaged stainless steel tube
with a short length of resistance wire and an even shorter length of
thermocouple wire inside it. I could buy a whole new solder station
with more bells and whistles, albeit of a "lesser brand", for less.
--
Pete
Pete Turnbull
For those interested in playing with Jim's emulator, a few resources:
Bitsavers has some doco and bits:
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/prime/http://bitsavers.org/bits/Prime/
I have been assembling what I hope will be the definitive Prime info
site. It's not complete, but contains manuals scanned by, among
others, AEK and Jim Wilcoxson, as well as material from my Prime-using
past, etc. I have more documentation and software to add as I have
time.
https://sysovl.info/reference_prime.html
Of particular use might be this writeup on installing PRIMOS Revs 22 or
23 on the emulator. It's set up for the old demo version of the
emulator, so needs a fair amount of updating, but may help get you
started. I'll work on it soonish.
https://sysovl.info/reference_prime_drb_installing_primos.html
De
From: Tom Uban
> Does anyone have information on having a replacement PDP-11/05 key made?
Google is your friend; here:
https://gunkies.org/wiki/PDP-11/05#Keys
I don't recall if there's anough info there to create new keys without an
original to copy. At one point I made a run of copies (after posting a call
here); I suppose I could do so again.
Noel
>According to the Ref Manual, that's the one I was looking for.
>Now to mount the RL on RSTS and see what it takes to build it
>there. I'll let the list know how I make out in case someone
>else is interested.
>
>bill
The RL02 image is RSX Files-11, and I?m not sure if you can mount that with RSTS. I could move it to a RT-11 formatted RL02 or if your RSTS system is on HECnet I can put it where you could get it that way. I looked for the original DOS-11 formatted DEC distribution tape but can?t find it at this time. Let me know if you need anything.
Mark
I mistakenly bought some memory thinking it was for a VAXstation 4000 VLC.
It turns out that it isn't. It physically fits a VAXstation 4000 Model 60,
but putting it in that machine the machine fails to power up. The part
number is 50-19464-02, and I am unable to identify what machine it works in.
Can anyone tell me where to find out?
Thanks
Rob
I'm working on restoring an LMI Lambda, which is missing both its tape
drive and its disk drive. If anyone has a Cipher F880 9-track drive or a
Fujitsu Eagle SMD drive, drop me a line. Be nice if they were in working
condition, but so long as they're repairable I can work with 'em.
Thanks!
Josh