On Windows Putty is "better" than HyperTerminal as a "glass TTY" : http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/. And, it has many other useful capabilities.

While PuTTY is free, I prefer CRT from VanDyke Software for terminal and SSH needs on Windows.

You may have the switches reversed. From what I can discern in the photo, those appear to be rocker-style switches (rather than the slide-style switches). With the rocker switches like that one usually pushes down on the side of the desired selection, which would make 2,4,8 on, the others off. Agreed that this is the reverse of what the red marks would suggest, so it's rather ambiguous.

Adrian Stoness wrote: I dislike hyperterminal fairly intensely, and use PuTTY for SSH (not that that's useful with a PDP-8!) and serial comms under Windows, but I prefer Kermit under Linux/Unix (Kermit for Windows is good but isn't free). You can use Kermit as a file transfer program but it really wants to talk to another Kermit on the other end, so on a PDP-8 it's mostly useful either simply as a console terminal, or terminal + file transfer if you're running something like OS/8 and Kermit-12 on the 8/A. Otherwise something simpler like rsend that I mentioned before, plus a simple terminal program, is more useful. my dip switches are at for 2400 baud with tty turned off as according to Not sure, but others have answered that. am i supost to see anything pop up like on the 11?? or be able to input No, you aren't, unless your 8 has a bootstrap that includes some sort of console program - which would be unusual. A PDP-8 doesn't have anything like the equivalent of ODT or a boot conversation such as most PDP-11s have. When you start it up, you would usually have to toggle in the RIM loader, unless of course it's already been saved in non-volatile core. That doesn't issue any prompts or sign-on message, though. From first startup, it goes like this: toggle in the RIM loader (either the slow-speed reader version for ASR33 or similar, or the high-speed version for high speed PTP reader -- they're slightly different) start the RIM loader load the BIN loader from tape run the BIN loader if it didn't self-start from the RIM loader load and run whatever OS, diagnostic, or utility you want You have to watch the lights to see if the PDP-8 is running or not, for example to see when a loader has finished; none of them issue prompts. There are a few toggle-in programs and some related stuff in the PDP-8 directory on my website at http://www.dunnington.u-net.**com/public/PDP-8/<http://www.dunnington.u-… The cylon toggle-in and some of the others in tests.txt are not very interesting on an 8/A as it has an octal display rather than rows of lights; I use them for demos when I'm at exhibitions and only have a PDP-8/E processor box rather than a complete system, but tests.txt does contain some very simple serial line tests and demos. You'll find them useful while you check the serial line is set up correctly. rimloader.txt describes the RIM loader, if you need to toggle it in. In all these files, the first column is the address, the 2nd is the code, 3rd is labels, and rest is mnemonics or comments, and by stripping off everything after the second column you get something that can be turned immediately into a RIM-format file by the program called rim (see rim.c for the source). -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York

Adrian Stoness wrote: You need to compile it, eg from the source at http://www.dunnington.u-net. **com/public/PDP-8/rsend.c<http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/PDP-8/rsend.c>or Kevin McQuiggin's website. i dunno if i am an idiot or what. when i run the terminal software i can't Running PuTTY or something similar, on a laptop, connected to he PDP-8/A? You need to be running something on the 8/A as well, to talk to it. Unless you have loaded something there, it will be doing absolutely nothing. Until you load some software -- whether that's the RIM loader, a little test program toggled in, or an OS, the PDP-8/A is no more than a noisy room heater, a box of completely dumb unprogrammed elecrical parts. Effectively bare metal. also how am i guna load a rim tape when i don't got one :( You need to have the rimloader running in the PDP-8. You put that in manually, from the keypad on the panel. Then you use that to load any tapes that are in RIM format, from a TTY with a tape reader (or RIM-format tape image files from a laptop running rsend or equivalent).