[TUHS] Happy birthday, PDP-8!

[ggm@algebras.org (George Michaelson)]

I briefly, at the age of 7 had a dual-processor cardboard pdp-8.

IFIP68 was held in edinburgh, and my dad was on the organizing
committee. So I got to go to the trade show alongside, and Dec had
cardboard 8's they handed out as a promotional freebie to anyone who
signed up.

I got two. But I'd had the wooden crate a PDP-1 came in for a backyard
tank before that so I was kinda- downsizing.

-G

On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 9:52 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> Let's see how much this thread can drift...
>
> The venerable PDP-8 was introduced in 1965 today (or tomorrow if you're on
> the wrong side of the date line).  It was the first computer I ever used,
> back around 1970 (I think I'd just left school and was checking out the
> local University's computer department, and played with BASIC and FOCAL).
>
> And (hopefully) coincidentally the Pentium first shipped in 1993; the
> infamous FDIV defect was discovered a year later (and it turned out that
> Intel was made aware of it by a post-grad student a bit earlier), and what
> followed next was an utter farce, with some dealers refusing to accept the
> results of a widely-distributed program as evidence of a faulty FPU.
>
> --
> Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will
> suffer."