I just received an email from the Living Computer Museum that they were
suspending operations. It wasn't clear from the email what that
actually means.
TTFN - Guy
I was interested in computers from grade 11; that would have been in 1967.
I got my first microcomputer in 1978, a Heathkit H8 - terribly priced here
in Canada. From there I went to the Coleco ADAM. It was essentially an
APPLE II clone, well the OS was. Not sure what has become of ADAM-user
groups and whether any computer history museum mentions it or not!
Happy computing!
Murray ?
> From: Bill Degnan
`
>> I think I have a spare set of boards for the controller.
> I might be interested if no one else wants this.
You'll need a backplane too - and that's non-trivial. (I'm in the process of
producing one for a KE11-A.) The RK611 is a 9-slot (although several slots
are just SPC, and can be ignored).
Hence the plaint on my 'PDP-11 Models' page:
http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/pdp11/PDP-11_Models.html
"DO NOT just keep the boards, and discard the box, bulkhead panels, cables,
etc. Everyone does that, as a result of which we are now over-supplied with
boards - but the cables, boxes etc are now rare (un-obtainium in some cases
..) These are all now worth a lot more than the cards are!"
Noel
As a past occasional maintainer of SAIL, I'll add my version of history:
I believe the compiler originated as a class assignment for Jerry Feldman's
compiler writing class. As noted, Dan Swinehart was one of the principal
contributors. The addition of LEAP to SAIL was a direct result of
Feldman's past work at Lincoln Labs.
SAIL was used by everyone for everything at the AI Lab because of it's
"kitchen sink" philosophy including the link to assembly language inside
the language.
Eventually, a source language debugger called BAIL was written by John
Reiser. With the slow and steady decline of the PDP-10 and the ascent of
Unix, SAIL went off into the sunset.
[MWK,AIL]
Follow up to the Living Computer Museum discussion...
I can understand why CHM does not allow access to the hardware,
But what about the software?
It should all be downloadable.
Randy
On May 27, 2020, Lars Brinkhoff <lars at nocrew.org> wrote:
> Al Kossow wrote:
>>> Algol W was from Eroupe?
>> Algol W was from Stanford, written by Wirth when he was there
>
> I wonder if there's any connection to Stanford's SAIL language?
Good question. I believe the answer is ?Wirth was initially involved with both?. Here?s a bit of history in the Preface to a SAIL manual:
HISTORY OF THE LANGUAGE
The GOGOL III compiler, developed principally by Dan Swinehart at the
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project, was the basis for the non-LEAP
portions of SAIL. Robert Sproull joined Swinehart in incorporating the
features of LEAP The first version of the language was released in November,
1969. SAIL's intermediate development was the responsibility of Russell
Taylor, Jim Low, and Hanan Samet, who introduced processes, procedure
variables, interrupts, contexts, matching procedures, a new macro system,
and other features. Most recently John Reiser, Robert Smith, and Russell
Taylor maintained and extended SAIL. They added a high-level debugger,
conversion to TENEX, a print statement, and records and references.
http://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/decuslib20-01/01/decus/20-0002/sail.man.html
And here?s a 1964 Stanford TimeSharing Project Memo by McKeeman and Wirth on Gogol:
Gogol is a simple, integer arithmetic language used under the PDP-1 time sharing system at Stanford. This memorandum includes the syntactical definition of the language and a number of sample programs as well as a brief description of the operational characteristics of the compiler. Gogol was designed to permit fast compilation of efficient machine code directly into memory. The speed of compilation together with the accessibility of the text editor make program de- bugging relatively rapid. The examples presented here plus the availability of the compiler should form an adequate basis for learning to use the language. More detailed information depends heavily on a knowledge of PDP-1 hardware.
https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:jy391jj5758/jy391jj5758.pdf
Thanks for the suggestions. I currently have Rescue Tape brand self adhesive silicone tape on the cable, but it looks like it is causing corrosion of the spiral-wound metal shield wires. The wrap around heat shrink might cost more than just buying a new adapter! It looks like there is an 1/8" split wire loom that could work, or perhaps Plasti Dip spray would make a reasonable coating.
