From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: iking@killthewabbit.org (Ian King) Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 09:21:38 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped In-Reply-To: <20140617121419.GD3947@mercury.ccil.org> References: <1402856379.23321.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <21ae9091-baed-493a-b84f-ec96efc66955.maildroid@localhost> <20140617013840.GB3947@mercury.ccil.org> <9cea91b5-f4ee-46a3-80b3-899b1ee00d69.maildroid@localhost> <20140617121419.GD3947@mercury.ccil.org> Message-ID: 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