[Fwd: Restoration of a PDP-8a]

On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 12:16 PM, Marc Howard <cramcram at gmail.com> wrote: In my experience, *most* PDP-8/a units have only the minimal function (3-switch) front panel. I ended up buying one a few years back from a fellow collector just to have it for helping to diagnose faulty boards (plus I always wanted one for the "cool factor"). I always had at least an RX8E and RX01/RX02 on any -8/a, which was an entry level system back in the day. You could boot them from paper tape, but I don't believe that was commonly done much after 1980. The real trick now is if you have older boot PROMs and a newer boot device (RL8A) and finding replacement PROMs. ISTR blanks are $5-$8 each now, and you need a blaster that can do bi-polar devices. (Lyle Bickley provided a link to the newest ROM images on his own site via this message http://www.classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctech/2010-July/076991.html ) While you _can_ run older paper-tape software on an -8/a, they were largely configured and sold with the expectation of running OS/8 from floppy or hard disk. Not exclusively by any means, but primarily. As with earlier discussions about KM8AA boot PROMs, I can't seem to easily find the relevant tables of which PROMs support what devices. I *think* there is a paper-tape loader in at least one of them, but I'm having problems verifying that. I know it's documented in at least one of the printsets, but I can't recall where. It wouldn't be hard to rig up a modern computer to emulate paper tape and feed a machine that way (though you'd have to set the console SLU to something other than 110 bps if you wanted to use a bog-standard USB-serial dongle). -ethan