🚀 go-pugleaf

Joe Pylka <pylka@castle.net> wrote in message
news:qI7w5.13201$2z6.193059@news-east.usenetserver.com...

>> Yeah, used those simulaneously with the punched cards. Cards
>> on the mainframe, paper tape on the DEC mini. At 10cps with an
>> ASR33 too. Real fun loading something big like Focal with only a
>> checksum on the end of the tape so that you could wait an hour
>> or two for the tape to load, only to find that it had had an error
>> loading and you had to start over again. Certainly made you check
>> that you really did want to load something else before doing that.

> It was a red-letter day when we finally programmed a PROM
> to load the 22 or so locs and data into a PDP-8 so we Could
> load the tape instead of entering them in by hand...

Yeah, that bloody boostrap is still permanently engraved in my 'mind'

DEC went for diode panels before PROMs were even invented.
Basically the card had a full set of diodes and you just snipped out
some of them with a pair of sidecutters to 'program' the 'rom' Forget
what happened with the PDP8, I first saw that on an 11/10AD

> But then, this was a machine with core, so we
> kept FOCAL in memory and it never went away.

Wasnt feasible in our case, mainly because it was a fancy
machine controller, a sampling NMR running my code when
it wasnt running Focal. A PDP8S too, the serial one.

> It was also nice when the PDP-9 came with the superspeed paper tape reader.....

Yeah, I thought it was Xmas in spades with the PDP9 and
300cps paper tape. Interesting machine, I did all the hardware
maintenance on that, with lots of our own interfacing, essentially
using PDP15 style TTL in big wire wrap socket trays.