Happy Birthday, PDP-8

[Paul Anderson]

Sounds like a great system. Congrats.

ADVENT would sure be a great test of my cpu and memory, but I think I would
fail.

I wish I was I was in that great shape when I hit 42, which was many years
ago....

On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 1:36 PM, Rick Bensene <rickb at bensene.com> wrote:

> To celebrate the PDP8-'s birthday, Sunday I fired up the PDP 8/e system
> with two RK05's, RX01 (Dual), PC8E/PC05 Paper Tape, EAE, 32K, and 2
> Serial Ports with SerialDisk running on one of them, and did a complete
> set of MAINDEC diagnostics on it just to make sure all was well.  Took
> quite a while to get through them all, but they all passed with no
> problems.
>
> The system was built in 1972, and so it's 42+ years old, and I am
> continuously amazed at how well and robustly these machines were
> designed.  DIdn't even have to boot OS/8, it was still in core.    But,
> just to check, I did boot it off of RK05 using the SW switch (diode Boot
> ROM board), and it booted up in just over 1 second.   Those were the
> days.
>
> I fired up CHEKMO (Chess) and set the machine playing against itself for
> a while - a good CPU exercise.  I then ran ADVENT (Adventure) and played
> around in it for a bit, which is a good test of Disk I/O and CPU.  Also
> fired up BASIC and loaded a few of the vintage game programs (STRTRK
> among them), and before shutting it down (it was starting to get late),
> I did a test compile of a pretty good-sized old Fortran program -- that
> definitely exercises the disks quite vigorously.  It ls always amazing
> how much mass the RK05's push around to move the heads.  The rack
> definitely shakes from both drives thrashing the heads around.
>
> It sure brought back a lot of memories of the summer job I had between
> Junior and Senior year of High School where I wrote some high speed
> floating point math routines for PDP 8/e with EAE.
>
> Happy Birthday, PDP-8!
>
> -Rick Bensene
>