🚀 go-pugleaf

jones@pyrite.cs.uiowa.edu (Douglas W. Jones,201H MLH,3193350740,3193382879) writes:
>	At work, I've talked our department into providing a home for a
>	1966 vintage PDP-8, and I have a small group of students starting
>	the job of figuring out whether it is safe to plug it in and try
>	turning it on (such wonderful questions as: are all the flip-chip
>	modules plugged into the right slots, and what cables go where?)

	The RPI-ACM once (early-80's) had a PDP-8 (no /anything), ALL flip-
chips, with adjustable power supply for preventive maintenance, and an entire
second cabinet of flip-chips for running X-ray crystallography experiments.
(It included a pulse-amplifier hooked up to a speaker for playing music...)

	I designed (but never built) a DMA printer driver using flip-chips
to run a 700 LPM Burroughs line-printer we also happened to have.  (That
printer was eventually responsible for sending me to the hospital, when we
had a "printer-bash" during GM week...)

	I also use an 8/e with dectape in high-school.  I still have about 10
tapes, mostly set up using Educomp OS/8 and EduBasic.  I also have 3 trays of
paper-tape software, including Focal, a couple of basics, fortran (I think),
and a bunch of other things, including a chess program.

	The RPI PDP-8 was lent to the secretary for a halloween thing at his
fraternity (he wasn't much into real programming), and his fraternity burnt
down before he returned it.  argh....  I wanted that machine...

	I would _love_ to get my hands on an 8/e with tape drives.  Even
an 8/anything with paper tape would be better than nothing.

-- 
To be or not to be = 0xff
-
Randell Jesup, Jack-of-quite-a-few-trades, Commodore Engineering.
{uunet|rutgers}!cbmvax!jesup, jesup@cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com  BIX: rjesup  
Disclaimer: Nothing I say is anything other than my personal opinion.