🚀 go-pugleaf

Charles Lasner writes:
> SKED really doesn't give you much of a PDP-8-specific viewpoint

True, it gives you a state language viewpoint.

Had it given you more of a PDP-8-specific viewpoint,
its users probably wouldn't have been able to master it,
and their programs probably would have been either trivial
or incorrect.  The nice thing about SKED was how it made
realtime data acquisition and process control of multiple
concurrent processes accessible to nonprogrammers through
use of the state language.  It could and later did run
on other machines.

Still, SKED's historical and technical connection to 8's is
well established.  The 8 was reliable and affordable enough
for a lab to buy one of its very own.  It's hard to explain
to youngsters what a revolution that was.  You couldn't do
realtime stuff with your slice of the department's timesharing
machine.  Suddenly, you could afford to buy a machine to
dedicate to automating Skinner boxes.  The 8 was also fast
enough to do reasonable amounts of I/O getting and putting
things from your lab device.  DEC documented enough of the
hardware, interfaces, and operating system that you could
write a system like SKED.  They kept the 8 standardized
enough that most 8 programs ran on most 8's, a property
found only in the mainframe world up until then.  And they
sold enough that you weren't on your own.  Hard to explain
to folks now how amazing that was too -- "you have an 8?
Wow!  We have an 8."

-- Jon
--
Jon Krueger  jpk@ingres.com