DECdatasystems

This sounds like a machine I used to work on. PDP-8/a, two floppy drives, a VT-50 terminal that looked like it could have been provisioned for an internal thermal printer, and ours had a LA-36. We ran two OS's in it, COS-310 (which I wrote DIBOL under), and some other OS that was really bizarre (it was a DEC product). It's single biggest claim to fame was that no one could ever figure out how to do a directory of the disk. You either knew what was out there, or you reformatted it. We used this system to process cassette tapes written by a box attached to copy machines. It was one of the first copy counting control systems, and we sold a bunch into law firms. Prior to the system going in, the firm may bill as much as 90% of it's copying cost to internal budgets. With our system, the legal aide or lawyer entered an account number into a calculator like keypad, then made copies. Either after a time out, or a new account number being entered, the date, time, account number, and number of copies made was written to the tape. My job, at the time, was to take the tapes, read them on a cassette reading into this funky OS on the PDP-8/a, which wrote them as files to the disk, then reboot the system into COS-310, and process the data on the data disk. After a few months of working there, I started modifying the processing code to run a little faster, print pretty banners on the front page for the 3 letter client abbreviation (got a $1000 bonus from that. Looked a lot less tacky than using a thick black magic marker). I also made a few changes to the tape read app, which taught PDP-8 assembly. It was pretty neat, at the time. I don't miss it at all. --John