HFU HF Underground
General Category => Huh? => Topic started by: ChrisSmolinski on February 27, 2018, 1240 UTC
-
I bet Fansome could get an SDR running on this... look at all the buttons and lights!
https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/my-raspberry-pi-thinks-its-a-pdp-8
(https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/rel-assets/dsauto/temp/uploaded/Main8.jpg)
-
That being said, Al might be vaxinated and thus immune to the pdps charms.
-
What a blast from the past! The first system we built was an aircraft fatigue test system
using an original "Straight 8" with 4k of magnetic core memory (yes, boys and girls 4,096
bytes of core memory, period - no RAM, no ROM). The programmers wrote the machine
code by hand and then it was toggled in via the switch register.
The days of my mis-spent youth are coming back to haunt me. 8)
-
I used one of these in high school, calculating asteroid orbits. Does anyone remember the "FoCal" language, sort of a combination of Fortran and Basic?
Later, in college, I worked one summer with an Intersil system that emulated the PDP-8, which was, I believe, the first microprocessor system. This was going to be used to control the seismic stations in Southern California, so that they could store quake data on site for later retrieval and analysis, rather than sending it in real-time via phone lines, which is problematic during an actual quake.
Knobs, buttons, blinking lights, paper tape; those were REAL computers back then.
-
Don't forget punch cards.