10 Apr
2015
10 Apr
'15
9:12 a.m.
On 2015-04-10 18:00, Rod Smallwood wrote:
Not seamstresses but nimble fingered girls in Puerto
Rico and the
Phillipines
Core was in effect ROM. Power the system down switch off and anytime
later turn it back on and whatever was
in core was still there. I can remember our Field Service guys
restarting the final factory diagnositc on new systems.
But... That is not what ROM is. You are just talking about store that
persists over power failure. You can still overwrite it whenever.
And actually, reading core is destructive. So you can never have core
for rom. It needs to be rewritten whenever it is read.
Johnny
On 10/04/2015 16:32, geneb wrote:
On Fri, 10 Apr 2015, Paul Koning wrote:
Yes.
On Apr 10, 2015, at 10:38 AM, geneb <geneb at
deltasoft.com> wrote:
Did the PDP14 (or any machine of that era) ever use hand-threaded
(by the end user) core boards as ROM?
Do you mean DEC machine?
I don?t know any. Certainly not any PDP-11;
those used solid state
ROMs, or in the early boot ROM cards, diode arrays.
I want to make sure it wasn't in use before I double-down on calling
shennanigans on "Joe" in this thread:
http://hackaday.com/2015/04/08/restoring-a-vintage-pdp-1104-computer/#comme…
As far as I know, machines of that era used cores that were so small
the DEC hired master seamstresses (myth?) to make them. It's certainly
not something that would be done in the field by John Q. Programmer.
If I'm wrong, I'll happily admit it, but it just doesn't sound
reasonable.
Thanks!
g.