[TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped
Ian King
iking at killthewabbit.org
Thu Jun 19 02:21:38 AEST 2014
On Jun 17, 2014, at 5:14 AM, John Cowan wrote:
> iking at killthewabbit.org scripsit:
>
>> Well, the University of Oregon might disagree with you about the
>> PDP-7.
>> They ran the DECsys monitor,
>
> Ah, I didn't know about that. Still, pretty sub-minimal: Fortran II,
> assembler, editor, period. It made OS/8 look quite rich by
> comparison.
U of O also had FOCAL running on it, which may have been a local port
- I'll have to find out.
>
>> Hardly useless....
>
> However, according to the manual, DECsys required an 8Kword PDP-7,
> whereas
> the "Space Travel" (not "Spacewar!") machine had only 4Kwords.
Yes, thanks for the correction - a slip of the virtual tongue. I
didn't realize the Bell Labs machine was so basic - in fact, it was
my understanding that the basic machine was 8Kwords. The machine at
LCM actually has 16K, with a DEC field mod to allow it to be
addressed in PDP-9/15 fashion.
>> And what's wrong with OS/8?
>
> Nothing. Indeed, I cut my teeth on it on a PDP-8/M with 8K and a
> single
> DECtape with the driver in ROM. I was using the term descriptively to
> indicate the kind of OS available for the PDP-9. A modified
> version also
> ran on the '15, it seems. But the native OSes were DOS-15 (roughly
> RT-11)
> and RSX-15 (a classic DEC RSX).
OK, we're good then. :-) I have a soft spot for the 12-bit
machines, if it doesn't show. -- Ian
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