18 Jan
2010
18 Jan
'10
4:54 a.m.
On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 2:25 AM, Philipp Hachtmann <hachti at hachti.de> wrote:
Not completely.
?Part of what
makes them desirable is
that they are now ?over 40 years old and when found, usually complete
enough to run and quite portable.
Portable, yes. But also quite useless. You can add peripherals to the IO bus - if you have
them.
Or a high-speed paper tape reader/punch with in-cabinet boards (one of
the few peripherals).
But you cannot run OS/8 on the machine.
No. I'm still trying to build up my first PDP-8/L to that level - and
haven't succeeded yet.
In the meantime, it does run FOCAL.
For that purpose
you'd need an expansion box with further 4K. And then you're at the 8/L's
maximum.
Not so... I have an 8K external box on an -8/L - total of 12K. Yes,
it's 100% DEC.
AFAIK the basic system can be fitted with paper tape
interfaces.
That makes it a bit more usable. If you have the bare machine, you can
toggle in programs and run paper tape software and - very important - spend
your day waiting for the teletype to read in your program.
One of my -8/Ls came with high-speed punch/reader - that's much easier
to live with, but not all that common.
Core memory was quite common with /e/f/m systems as
well! Even the /a sold
with core. But I have no info about the relation between /a with and without
core.
Any -8/e can take core. I think there were some non-core-capable PSUs
sold in some models of -8/m. There are definitely two different
revisions of the -8/a that are core-capable and MOS-memory-only.
I'm quite curious about the 8/i's end price on
eBay!
I am, too.
-ethan