🚀 go-pugleaf

mmm@cup.portal.com (Mark Robert Thorson) recently posted that: 
|I heard a story that DEC had real problems getting one particular pdp-6 to
|function (not surprising, it's made out of something called "delay-line
|logic"), and that they pushed this lemon into the lake behind the converted
|textile mill which was DEC's main plant in those days.  Anyone care to
|confirm that?

They drained the mill pond not so many years ago and found all sorts of
strange stuff!  I know of one fellow who got into an argument with a
tech and threw his entire toolbox out the window into the pond.  Lots
of dead boards that couldn't be debugged are in there too.

The first generation 10, the KA, was also a non-synchronous machine and
used "trickle down" logic.  You could single step and watch the register
lights change over the front panel and do a pretty good job of debug.
All you needed to do really was find where the pulses failed to make
the next rank toggle.  The front panel (with lights) was a pretty big
cost on that machine!

One last story.  This one is about Alan Kotok (whose initials backwards
gave the KA it's model designation) and a certain PDP-6 that was sold
to a major New York City firm and installed in a curtained fishbowl.
In those days each machine was a one-of-a-kind job complete with its
own set of prints annotated with added capacitors "for noise suppression"
and so forth.  If an engineer's machine failed in the field, the 
engineer got on the plane and fixed it!

So it was that Alan was dispatched to NYC to fix the machine in the
fishbowl.  After some consideration he had them close the curtains
and everyone but a security guard leave the room.  The guard and
Alan then proceeded to pick up one end of the 6 and drop it!  And
sure enough, the little bit of wire that had fallen into the backplane
came loose and timesharing was restored.

As Pogo observed, "Them war the days."


	- Dale (N1US)	Encore Computer Corporation, Marlborough, Mass.
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