29 Mar
2020
29 Mar
'20
4:24 p.m.
I can't be the only one who would like to see the FORTRAN source of some of those
editors, linkers, macro processors.
As a medical electronics guy, I had to deal with a fortran monster of a database engine,
manman.
It was legacy in with the FDA, but woa, what a suck piece of crap it is.
Hi Diane. Still Cadence here, signal integrity work for space
________________________________
From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of Diane Bruce via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Sunday, March 29, 2020 4:09 PM
To: Nigel Johnson <nw.johnson at ieee.org>; General Discussion: On-Topic and
Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Subject: Re: PDP-8 Straight 8 restoration
On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 05:59:42PM -0400, Nigel Johnson via cctalk wrote:
Brings back memories! My first 6800 cross assembler
came to me as 2000
Fortran source code punch cards. We had an F4R4 compiler on the PDP11 but
the card reader was on the PDP-8.
Funny how the kids don't realise Fortran was the 'C' language at one time.
Editors, linker, macro preprocessors a lot of it was done in Fortran. ;)
The only common peripheral was paper tape. One night, the Chief Engineer
and I fed the cards into the PDP8 card reader, punched tape, and fed it
directly into the PDP11 tape reader. X-on X-off was handled by hitting the
stop and continue buttons on the PDP8 as the punch was faster than the
reader. The buffer was a pile of paper tape in the floor, which we
carefully prevented from tangling. Somehow OS/8 managed to not crash with
the constant start/stop.
heh I can only imagine.
Nobody was more surprised than we were when the output compiled perfectly on
the PDP11 and we made our first 6800 program - a ham repeater controller!
Cool!
The Chief Engineer is still alive - I was at his 95th birthday last year and
we often have fun talking about the good old days!
Nice!
cheers,
Nigel Johnson
On 29/03/2020 16:59, Diane Bruce via cctalk wrote:
--
- db at FreeBSD.org db at db.net http://www.db.net/~db
On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 09:47:51AM +1300, Brendan
McNeill via cctech wrote:
--
Nigel Johnson
MSc., MIEEE
VE3ID/G4AJQ/VA3MCU
Amateur Radio, the origin of the open-source concept!
You can reach me by voice on Skype: TILBURY2591
If time travel ever will be possible, it already is. Ask me again yesterday
This e-mail is not and cannot, by its nature, be confidential. En route from me to you,
it will pass across the public Internet, easily readable by any number of system
administrators along the way.
Nigel Johnson <nw.johnson at ieee.org>
Please consider the environment when deciding if you really need to print this message
Here in NZ and around the world many of us are in
lockdown and spending more time on our computers, if that were possible. I have just
completed the restoration of a PDP-8 Straight 8 which I believe is the only one in New
Zealand. You can view the restoration story and find appropriate resources here:
https://pdp-8.nz <https://pdp-8.nz/>
While it plays Chess, it would be great if someone wanted to write (say) a Prime Number
Generator, or some other application and email it to me off list. I have Focal-69 and can
probably source other languages for this wonderful old machine with 4K of memory.
I
have memories of keying in RIM and BIN. Long long time ago. I also learned
how to talk to the OS/8 file system so we could play morse code from a file
instead of a paper tape for our University club station. ;)
--------------//----------------
brendan at mcneill.co.nz
+64 21 881 883
73 de VA3DB for those that care ;)