Brings back memories!? My first 6800 cross assembler came to me as 2000 Fortran source code punch cards. We had an F4R4 compiler on the PDP11 but the card reader was on the PDP-8. The only common peripheral was paper tape.? One night, the Chief Engineer and I fed the cards into the PDP8 card reader, punched tape, and fed it directly into the PDP11 tape reader.? X-on X-off was handled by hitting the stop and continue buttons on the PDP8 as the punch was faster than the reader.? The buffer was a pile of paper tape in the floor, which we carefully prevented from tangling.? Somehow OS/8 managed to not crash with the constant start/stop. Nobody was more surprised than we were when the output compiled perfectly on the PDP11 and we made our first 6800 program - a ham repeater controller! The Chief Engineer is still alive - I was at his 95th birthday last year and we often have fun talking about the good old days! cheers, Nigel Johnson On 29/03/2020 16:59, Diane Bruce via cctalk wrote: -- Nigel Johnson MSc., MIEEE VE3ID/G4AJQ/VA3MCU Amateur Radio, the origin of the open-source concept! You can reach me by voice on Skype: TILBURY2591 If time travel ever will be possible, it already is. Ask me again yesterday This e-mail is not and cannot, by its nature, be confidential. En route from me to you, it will pass across the public Internet, easily readable by any number of system administrators along the way. Nigel Johnson <nw.johnson at ieee.org> Please consider the environment when deciding if you really need to print this message

On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 05:59:42PM -0400, Nigel Johnson via cctalk wrote: Funny how the kids don't realise Fortran was the 'C' language at one time. Editors, linker, macro preprocessors a lot of it was done in Fortran. ;) heh I can only imagine. Cool! Nice! -- - db at FreeBSD.org db at db.net http://www.db.net/~db

On Sun, Mar 29, 2020, 5:10 PM Diane Bruce via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: He was lucky the card deck was in order. One of my first jobs was to read in old, horrible FORTRAN IV from punch card, then check it against a listing the boss had and edit to match... This was the same place we wrote malloc for FORTRAN and passed around all kinds of crazy data structures that offset into the malloc arena so it would run on both the pdp-11 and the vax... Warner

On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 8:13 AM Diane Bruce <db at db.net> wrote: Worse: 80% of the cards had that, but the other 20% didn't since they were later bug fixes. The decks that I had to verify were from the "in the barn" days of the company and had sat in storage for a few years. People would remove cards putting them back exactly in order... So when the boss, who was sure he did a program just like that back "when he was running this place out of my barn," discovered things weren't perfect it fell to me to 'fix' it because I was minimum wage high school kid help... No totally dropped decks, at least, and once I got them read into the computer I could edit them with a semi-real editor (visual TECO at a glorious 4800 baud). and I learned a lot about FORTRAN and just how bad it could be (the boss was a great businessman, much better than his FORTRAN prowess). Yea. And ugly tricks to overlay/alias heap1, heap2 and heap4 (which were for byte, word and longword access respectively). And converting between the different "pointer" types. It was helle ugly... But pointers in C that I learned a few years later were a piece of cake in comparison... Thankfully none of the boss' code was like this, and it got left behind when they moved to this code base. Ha! We had some assembler for the most time critical bits, but we wrote that in MACRO-11 directly and linked it in. Warner

Since we are all at home exchanging stories, I thought I would regale you with my best punch card one: My first job out of school was at Bell Canada in? Downtown Toronto. I was trained as an FE on their Univac 418 II systems that ran a Canada-wide store-and-forward MSDS - Message Switching Data Service (MSDS - means something else now!)? I also got trained on the PDP11, then PDP8, and Interdata 50. The year was 1972 or '73 I think. Since there was very little operating to do with a real-time system, we didn't have operators and did all the operating ourselves.? One system ran H23 (it had to be shutdown for maintenance over midnight because the system would crash if the time went backwards after midnight), the other, use by stockbrokers and the T. Eaton Company started at 0600 and was turned down at 2100. Being critical real time (after all, it fed about a thousand 110 baud teletypes across Canada :-) ) it would crash sometimes due to racing conditions that had not been forecast.? Instead of re-assembling the system (about four hours), the programmers would issue us with PARLO (PARameter LOader) cards to make patches after we loaded the enterprise code and before we started it.? This fixed the bugs by binary changes. One morning, I was on duty as the 0600 system crashed immediately after I started it.? As trained, I switched all the peripherals over to the backup machine and loaded the program on there, carrying the PARLO cards over and running them before I started that system.? Same crash happened, while the panic dump was still running between the first computer and the Uniservo VI C. Lots more attempts happened, including running heavy cables across the floor to patch in spares that were not on the transfer switch, until first, second, and finally third level managers were standing behind me as I tried new things.? "A 20-year old does not need this kind of stress", I thought! Upper management wanted to 'get somebody else' to work the computer by my boss told me to stand fast.? Suddenly, I had an idea.? We had an old IBM 028 punch sitting at the back of the room. "Go and copy these PARLO cards" I said to the programmer.? She scowled at being told what to do by this young kid, especially since she was management and I was not. But as nobody had any better ideas the managers told her to do it. Thankfully, my idea that the PARLO cards were worn thin so that the photo readers could see holes where there were not, was accurate.? The 028 used fingers to feel for the holes and so made a perfect copy! After that they instituted a policy of changing the PARLO cards or re-assembling on a regular basis! The attachment is a picture of where this happened. cheers, Nigel Johnson On 30/03/2020 11:41, Diane Bruce wrote: -- Nigel Johnson MSc., MIEEE VE3ID/G4AJQ/VA3MCU Amateur Radio, the origin of the open-source concept! You can reach me by voice on Skype: TILBURY2591 If time travel ever will be possible, it already is. Ask me again yesterday This e-mail is not and cannot, by its nature, be confidential. En route from me to you, it will pass across the public Internet, easily readable by any number of system administrators along the way. Nigel Johnson <nw.johnson at ieee.org> Please consider the environment when deciding if you really need to print this message

I was preparing to make the leap and buy my first personal computer--a PDP-8/E back in the day. The attraction was not just the low price of around $5000, but the fact that there was FORTRAN available for it. DEC made a big deal of that in their promotions. Wrote an emulator for it (in FORTRAN, of course) and still have my copy of Introduction to Programming". Never got the machine, however--other things got in the way. I still routinely deal with FORTRAN (capitalize the name for dialects earlier than F90). It's still hard to beat for a portable, fast mathematical HLL. The big competitor back in the day from Europe, Algol, appears to have disappeared from collective consciousness. --Chuck

Diane, Very nicely done. I read the whole thing. GOD Bless and Thanks, rich! On 3/29/2020 3:59 PM, Diane Bruce via cctech wrote:

On 3/30/2020 12:02 PM, Josh Dersch via cctech wrote: In restoring my PDP-8/s, diodes were the problem. Turns out they have steel leads that rust. Easy to see with a microscope. Badly rusted ones broke the glass body. I had to replace more than 200. Most turned into ~600 Ohm resistors, some open circuit. I'm sure I'm going to have to replace all of them over time. So how (and where) the machine was stored probably plays a big part in it's reliability. Bob -- Vintage computers and electronics www.dvq.com www.tekmuseum.com www.decmuseum.org