VCF East 2.0, Day one.

I have various BASIC versions of Spacewar and spinoffs that ran on our PDP-11/40. -----Original Message----- From: cctalk-bounces(a)classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces@classiccmp.org]On Behalf Of Bob Shannon Sent: Friday, July 16, 2004 9:27 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: VCF East 2.0, Day one. First off, I'd like to thank all the people who worked to put this together formally, and also a very special thank you to all those who just showed up and lent a hand! I'm very impressed with this years event overall. It seems to me we had a very different mix of people looking at the exhibits, as compated to VCF East 1.0. I had the oppertunity to spend some time talking with a younger programmer who worked at Sun. His experiance in the modern software world left him rather impressed at the sight of a running minicomputer that was running totally home-grown software, from the device drivers up to the file system. He really took the time to think and ask some excellent questions about the process of writing a O/S and programming language for a machine without an already running O/S, and my reasons for building a native ATA disk controller for my old CPU's. From his perspecitive, this is something thats nearly impractical with modern hardware. How do you bootstrap a workstation without even BIOS code or low-level drivers in ROM? In hindsight, I wish I'd halted the machine, and shown him how to enter binary machine code I found it facinating to see how much the very concept of a computer has changed since the early days. I think I gained a better understanding of the evolution of machines than I'd had before I'd been exposed to his perspecitve. There was also a good deal of good deals going on in the parking lot and hallways. I did miss a few exhibits from the last VCF East, I was really looking forward to seeing spacewar running on the Imlac and DPS-116(?). Would anyone have sourcecode for Spacewar, for any old mini? I'd love to port it to my HP's.