I am trying to figure out the voltages on my PDP-8/A (Omnibus)
logic lines. DEC's documentation, as usual, is confusing at best
on this (and other) subjects, and sometimes apparently
self-contradictory...
DEC used suffixes -L and -H to mean active-low and -high
respectively (that is, a logical assertion). They also say when
interfacing to the Omnibus that standard TTL levels are used. But
elsewhere in the manual it says Logic 1 levels are near 0 volts
and logic 0 is near 5 volts! So does this statement apply only to
the bus signals that are already active-low?
They've tried to over-explain it, and confused everybody :-)
Am I correct or not in interpreting, for example, an address line
named "MA 11 L" to be a logic 1/true/asserted when 0-0.8 volts and
logic 0/false when 2.0+ volts (TTL levels)?
Yes.
From my expeirience with Omnibus (and Unibus for that
matter), yes. An
address (or data) line is a logical 1 bit when it's a TTL low.
That is,
for location 0 in memory, all the address lines are TTL high.
-tony