24 May
2016
24 May
'16
9:50 a.m.
On 05/24/2016 11:32 AM, Swift Griggs wrote:
This could happen on any computer, but it seemed the PDP-5
(and PDP-8, same instruction set) were most likely to do
this. Actually, the PDP-5 had the instruction counter as
location zero of memory, so it may have been more prone to it.
Jon
On Tue, 24 May 2016, Jon Elson wrote:
We had contests, I think some people got under 15 seconds.
All from memory, of course!
The PDP-5 I did a fair bit of work on needed a
bootstrap program loaded
in from switches, it had no internal ROM for that.
How long did it usually take to
do it? And, whenever a program crashed, it generally
wiped the entire contents
of memory, so the boot had to be reloaded by hand.
Uhh, ouch! That'll learn
ya! You'd better be a careful coder, then I
guess. Sheesh.