PDP 8 Timesharing

[Brad Parker]

On 11/30/15 3:34 PM, Jay West wrote:
> Alternatively, TSS looks nice, but I am not sure that the full OS was ever found and is available? Hardware Reqs?
It's been found.  http://www.heeltoe.com/index.php?n=Cpus.Pdp8Tss-8

The core o/s can be rebuilt from scratch and run in several forms. I did 
a (very simple) implementation of the PDP-8/I and the required mods to 
make it work on an FPGA.  It's possible to emulate the behavior of the 
fixed head disks using an IDE and buffers.

I had the pleasure of seeing it run live, many years ago in my misguided 
youth.  I used it a lot and learned a lot from it. Gotta love all the 
blinking lights.

It's an interesting study in both virtualization and operating systems.  
Well worth the time, IMHO.

The UW version builds, but it requires rebuilt binaries of the basic 
apps.  I don't think we've ever recovered all the sources to the 
userland components, so I could never create a working UW file system.  
Some day.

But yes, TSS/8 exists and can be built and run.

-brad