Re: [luv-talk] The Age today: 30-year-old railway computers take a byte out of the past
From: "Duncan16v"
Oops. I stand corrected. PDP-11/74 then PDP-11/80
http://irse.org.au/index.php/en/component/docman/doc_download/569-metrol-con...
I keep an half inch tape from a K1630, an East German PDP-11 clone. In the first week studying back in 1987 they gave access to a K1630, three students at the time. They shared the CPU and 256kByte of RAM. When one started compiling the editing became slow, when two compiled the third student could go out for a coffee. When you were patient enough to endure it they gave you another challenge, a GD-80 vector graphics system from Hungary, looking like a radar screen and programmable with Logo and Turtle Graphics. After that you were qualified to use faster equipment. Amongst others we had two VAX-11/780 then, using Schneider PCs with a VT-320 emulation. The K1630 retired in (Northern) spring 1990. The paper strips were used for the carnival. That was its last job I know of. We just had a new building finished when the wall came down. The K1630 was already planned to stay behind and not to move into the new house - and the donations from the West (introducing SPARCstations, HPs, DECstations to us) were the final nail in the coffin. Unbelievable to find PDP-11s in use, here and now! Regards Peter
Quoting Petros (Petros.Listig@fdrive.com.au):
Unbelievable to find PDP-11s in use, here and now!
In the mid-1970s when I was a high school student, Community Computer Center at 1919 Menalto Ave., Menlo Park had a PDP-11 running RSTS and a PDP-8 or two, all accessible to us feckless members of the public. Lots of ASR-33 Teletypes, I recall. That's the community institution where Gordon French and friends founded the Homebrew Computer Club. (I was a hanger-on of that, too.) http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_09/Homebrew_CC_S...
Rick Moen wrote:
Quoting Petros (Petros.Listig@fdrive.com.au):
Unbelievable to find PDP-11s in use, here and now! .............snip http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_09/Homebrew_CC_S...
They certainly had some ideas, which have been lost over the years, witness the article: "COMPUTER PROGRAM VIRTUALLY ELIMINATES MACHINE ERRORS Spokesman for a local electronic firm have recently announced a computer program that- through a fresh application of an old technique- virtually eliminates lost time due to malfunction of computer components. Called OREMA (from Latin "Oremus"; meaning "Let us pray"), the program offers prayers at selected time intervals for the continued integrity of memory units, tape transports and other elements subject to depravity " Now that hardware is more reliable perhaps it can be recompiled for software ? :- | regards Rohan McLeod ;
Quoting Petros (Petros.Listig@fdrive.com.au):
Unbelievable to find PDP-11s in use, here and now!
It is possible they're using hardware like Strobe Data's Osprey FPGA PDP/11 implementation in a PC host. http://www.strobedata.com/home/products.html
In the mid-1970s when I was a high school student, Community Computer Center at 1919 Menalto Ave., Menlo Park had a PDP-11 running RSTS and a PDP-8 or two, all accessible to us feckless members of the public. Lots of ASR-33 Teletypes, I recall.
That's the community institution where Gordon French and friends founded the Homebrew Computer Club. (I was a hanger-on of that, too.) http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_09/Homebrew_CC_S...
In 1975.. Monash University had PDP/11s running MONECS with HP mark-sense card readers. You put in your card deck, and it compiled and ran your MONECS Fortran, Cobol, ... or would RJE into the Burroughs B6700. I should ask whether any of the MONECS code is still around as something else that can run on SIMH.
In reply to rdbrown@pacific.net.au:
It is possible they're using hardware like Strobe Data's Osprey FPGA PDP/11 implementation in a PC host. http://www.strobedata.com/home/products.html
When I saw this in that Metrol PDF: 2006 Emulation hardware successfully installed to stabilise the current PDP 11/84 computer system I was thinking maybe that they were running VAXes in PDP-11 emulation mode. :-) (Because the PDP-11 was so popular, when DEC brought out the VAX, they designed it to have a PDP-11 emulation mode.) And in reply to Rick Moen:
In the mid-1970s when I was a high school student, Community Computer Center at 1919 Menalto Ave., Menlo Park had a PDP-11 running RSTS and a PDP-8 or two, all accessible to us feckless members of the public. Lots of ASR-33 Teletypes, I recall.
From 1977, I was doing my Ph.D. in the Computer Vision Lab (CVL) at the University of Maryland. We had a fully loaded PDP-11/45 (with 128kB of *core* memory, 20MB fixed hard disk, 5MB removable). But we were running Unix -- Version 6 to start with if I remember correctly. (I also did a lot of my Honours Project on a PDP-8e in 1975, but that's another story. I'll just say: Yes, ASR-33 Teletypes and paper tape, and that 4k is a lot of memory if you have to fill it by hand... Well, actually 4k of 12-bit words, so I guess 6kB equivalent in today's money.)
Responding to what Petros said:
I keep an half inch tape from a K1630, an East German PDP-11 clone.
We'd often have four or five simultaneous users on the PDP-11 at CVL (out of about 30 in the Lab with accounts on the machine), doing image processing and analysis, and I remember interactive performance (editing, shell) was generally pretty good. But we had a strong culture of nicing any non-interactive processes (like compiles and image processing). Do you remember what OS you ran on the K1630? Maybe it didn't have a convenient nice. The habit of nicing makes and compiles and heavy batch processing (like even apt-get upgrade) stays with me even today -- part of the reason why I can be pretty happy on low-end hardware. -- Smiles, Les.
participants (5)
-
Les Kitchen -
Petros -
rdbrown＠pacific.net.au -
Rick Moen -
Rohan McLeod