[tony duell] :> oh, add a sirius one to the list; we forgot it. :Still sure you don't want to LART me? There's a few about - I was "lart"? :given one a few months back. Strange machine - the disk controller :has a 8048-series microcontroller and a lot of TTL on it. It's an :8088 machine, but virtually all the I/O chips come from the 65xx :family, etc. not surprising, considering that chuck peddle designed the 6502 in the first place. he was especially keen on the 6522 and tended to scatter them around his designs like confetti... ;> the disk drives used gcr and ran at variable speeds, not unlike the mac's (although was the gcr encoding method a more traditional 4 bits onto 5, as opposed to apple's software-based 6-to-8?) and also boasted a capacity of 1.2Mb and a data rate of 500kHz. and an 800x400 screen that took memory from the main map, rather than its own little partition off somewhere else. it wasn't a cheap design, but it was what the ibm should have been if it *had* to use that particular architecture... :Yes, 'everybody's got an 11' - but it's the sort of machine you :should have anyway :-). IMHO it's a very clean architecture. hmm. maybe. *grudge grudge* yes, it is a very nice architecture, particularly in the way both the source and destination operands can be specified as being in memory for all instructions (rather than just loads) - but our objections to actually having one are not based in rationality in this case... :And surely it's better to have a real PDP8 than to have a simulator it depends what you want it for. we want it for the programming challenge (what can usefully be done within 4k?) and it makes sense for programming challenge phase 1 to be hacking out a simulator. getting the real pdp8 is something we'd see as the last step, not the first. :Well, a Daybreak (the smallest, commonest D-machine, I think) :turned up at a radio rally a couple of weeks ago. It was the first :one I'd seen outside a museum.... hmm - so how much did you pay for it then...? :> [tiger] :The design was sold to HH electronics, :who went broke (no idea whether the cost of making the Tiger had :anything to do with this), and the machine never went into :production. probably - ram was expensive, modems were expensive, 7220s were expensive... it would have been a hacker's dream, but for most hobbyists, possibly overkill. -- Communa (together) we remember... we'll see you falling you know soft spoken changes nothing to sing within her... Net-Tamer V 1.08X - Test Drive