Happy Birthday, PDP-8

To celebrate the PDP8-'s birthday, Sunday I fired up the PDP 8/e system with two RK05's, RX01 (Dual), PC8E/PC05 Paper Tape, EAE, 32K, and 2 Serial Ports with SerialDisk running on one of them, and did a complete set of MAINDEC diagnostics on it just to make sure all was well. Took quite a while to get through them all, but they all passed with no problems. The system was built in 1972, and so it's 42+ years old, and I am continuously amazed at how well and robustly these machines were designed. DIdn't even have to boot OS/8, it was still in core. But, just to check, I did boot it off of RK05 using the SW switch (diode Boot ROM board), and it booted up in just over 1 second. Those were the days. I fired up CHEKMO (Chess) and set the machine playing against itself for a while - a good CPU exercise. I then ran ADVENT (Adventure) and played around in it for a bit, which is a good test of Disk I/O and CPU. Also fired up BASIC and loaded a few of the vintage game programs (STRTRK among them), and before shutting it down (it was starting to get late), I did a test compile of a pretty good-sized old Fortran program -- that definitely exercises the disks quite vigorously. It ls always amazing how much mass the RK05's push around to move the heads. The rack definitely shakes from both drives thrashing the heads around. It sure brought back a lot of memories of the summer job I had between Junior and Senior year of High School where I wrote some high speed floating point math routines for PDP 8/e with EAE. Happy Birthday, PDP-8! -Rick Bensene