19 Jun
2009
19 Jun
'09
10:59 a.m.
Hi Tony,
Tony Duell wrote:
Technically, that is of course correct. But the original thread was
clearly about things like operating syustems, applications, languages, etc.
For the machines I mentioned, the PDP8s, PDP11s,
and Philips P800s have a
hardware front panel that works even without any boot disks. You can
toggle in short programs and run them -- certainly programs to cause
As soon as you do that, you're running software - even if your intention
of interacting with it is only to cause output on a scope, even if it's
one opcode at a time. :-) Completely different from just powering up and
admiring it (or using it
as a space heater, or listening to the fans.)
Assming the CPU is not defective, and it's not being held in a reset or
halt state, then it's executing instructions. Maybe just from random
noise on the data bus, bnt it'll take that set of 1's and 0's as
instructions. So a powered-up machines is probagly running some kind of
'software'.
The former is
obviously more
interesting (as I said, I do try to get boot disks for my classics), but
the latter is a lot better than nothing.
In the same way, running an emulator is a lot better than nothing, if
you don't have the actual machine. :-)