🚀 go-pugleaf

From article <1989Jul25.155034.20792@lsuc.on.ca>, by jim@lsuc.on.ca (Jim Mercer):
> 
> 
> a friend of mine has a PDP9 with 2 8" drives ram and some "software".
> 
> he says i can have it if i want.
> 
> is there anything useful this machine can do?
> 
> i would like to have it run UNIX of one flavour or another.
> Is it too early a model?
> 
> please reply email and i will post a summary of the perceived
> abilities of the PDP9.

I tried an e-mail reply but neither of the author's addresses could
be reached.

I once maintained a PDP-9 system at Ohio State University around
1970.  I still have some of the manuals.

The PDP-9 was a preliminary version of the PDP-15.  Compared to a PDP-8
it was powerful.  We did some fairly sophisticated stuff on it, but I
doubt it has the capacity to run UNIX.  It had an 18-bit word size, and
a maximum capacity of 32K words (all core).  As I recall, our
peripherals included a teletype, paper tape reader and punch, DECtape
(which I still think is marvelous), a big line printer, and a bigger
disk that occupied a corner of the room and had a capacity on the order
of 1MB.  We also used homebrew A-D equipment including a storage-type
video display.

The system software was decent but limited and strictly single-user.
It was probably most similar to RT-11 for the PDP-11.  There was a
good macro assembler, debugger, and FORTRAN IV compiler, line editors
and simple utilities, and lots of diagnostic software.  Floating
point was handled by software, in which we found a few bugs.

An interesting note:  while I was managing the PDP-9 at OSU, a small
new company contracted to use our PDP-9 to develop some software while
waiting for their PDP-15 to be delivered.  The name of this company
was CompuServe.

I can probably answer some more detailed questions if you have any.

Jim Mooney				Dept. of Stat. & Computer Science
(304) 293-3607				West Virginia University
					Morgantown, WV 26506
INTERNET: jdm@a.cs.wvu.wvnet.edu