the PDP-11 lives!

There are some people who claim that this has already happened.

As shipped, I think this just emulates the hardware; coming up with an OS image to boot on it is up to you. Images of some older OS/3xx versions seem to be publically available.

Matt Roberds

Hey, what about the 11/20, 11/35, and all the variants of LSI-11?

I don't care about how good the emulation

LSI-11s had mini BIOS sorts of things, with minimal console serial commands, boot loaders, like that. I wrote a couple of them.

I used the 11/20, as well. Never met an 11/35, but I see it also has a front panel. Good!

I don't recall an LSI-11 with a front panel. Was there one?

Yes. The VAX-11/780, for example, ALSO had a minimal built-in console that you could use to examine memory and so on, before booting the system. Not unlike the LSI-11's microcoded debugger thingy. I used it for a little while. But as I mentioned, I never saw a front panel on an LSI-11. Never really liked them because of that (except for cost, of course.)

Jon

Not with all those switches and lights.

I think the first VAXen had a PDP-8 as the console. It actually booted the VAX engine and did some slow i/o.

Then I wouldn't care about it. No blinken' lights and no switches? Yuk!

I have to admit, I've no idea what a "VAXen" is. However, I did get to work on one of the earliest commercially sold VAX-11/780's. Which I think is the first VAX incarnation that was sold as a commercial system -- though I have to also admit a limited perspective here. I don't recall seeing a PDP-8 in the system we set up. Raised floors, yes. Air conditioning, yes. Fancy (expensive and smart) disk systems? Yes. But no PDP-8.

What's a "VAXen"? Are you thinking of the first-developed pre-commercial VAX systems? (I never saw one.)

Jon

That's the plural of VAX.

Come to think of it, it was probably a PDP-10 that I remember as using a PDP-8 to start things up.

Seems to me, the 8 might have been the first computer in a box. Was not in a rack, but the 8I was. The PDP-15 was my first experience on a computer, but only worked with the 8I.

Greg

PDP-8

The PDP-8I had those smooth switches where you could really load boot loader in fast. I wonder how fast I did it.

Greg

Well, the KA and KI were "PDP-10s in hardware" so they had no front-end processor. "Everyone knows" the FEP on the KL was a Unibus

I'm pretty sure the KS had a microproccesor based front-end much like the 8085 one in the contemporaneous VAXen)

After the PDP-8 had pretty-much gone to pasture, the only thing at Digital that was 8-ish was the WS78, which used a PDP-8-on-a-chip (I now can't recall if it was the Intersil 6120, or an in-house Digital part, or a Digital-fabbed 6120)

a PDP-8

in

computer,

I don't suggest being very sure about that one. In the very early 1970s i was trained on and could use AN/UYK-4 systems that were built since the mid 1960s. 30 bit computer including ram and IO in a single 38 inch wide cabinet 6 feet tall. Then i trained on the AN/UYK-7, a 32 bit modular computer with a minimal configuration of 28 inches wide and 36 inches tall that did about 1 mips. Still early 1970s. Both used magnetic core memory.

?-)

That would require training a second generation of MACRO-11 programmers.

Not much assembly programming was than on PDP-11's in 1980's, so the youngest PDP-11 assembly programmers would have been about 20 years old in 1990. At 2050, they would be 80 years old and the older ones past 100 years old.

There is quite slim chanches that any youngster of today would be so committed to be fluent in such assembly language. How many youngsters learn assembler for some modern architectures e.g. to optimize computer game graphics, not many.

Originally nuclear power plants were designed for 30 years life time, but when it became clear that getting a license for a new station is almost impossible, extending the life time of current reactors to

In Finland, there are two Russian made VVER-440 reactors, originally equipped with Ferranti control system, which during the last decade has been gradually replaced by Siemens automation.

I have been working with control systems for various industrial sectors for a long time and the usual contractual requirement is software and hardware support for at least 10 years. In many cases, our customers quite happily run 20-30 years old systems.

However, a 60 year support period would mean that we now would have to support electronics from the early 1950's with firebotles (tubes).

Thus, the most natural technological update is the mid-life update for a 50-60 year life cycle.

This plea for help to year 2050 sounds more like that they have lost all requirement specifications, design documents and possibly assembly/high level language source code. So now they want someone to disassemble the binary code and document it :-).

In that case, if they still have relocatable object records produced by MACRO-11 or Fortran IV Plus (i.e. input to TKB), I might even be able to help them, if only if I could find a paper tape reader for reading my object disassembler :-).

It would be good for them. It's a beautiful instruction set.

PDP-11 and 68K assembly is easy to learn, if you can understand bits and addressing and logical operations and 2's comp math. *IF*.

The 68K is also an elegant machine. RISC processors are less friendly; they were designed to make compiler happy, not to make people happy.

x86 doesn't make anything happy.

John G schrieb:

Hello,

not only IBM and not only mainframes. Wirewrapping was used for a lot of computers in that time. PCB backplanes were used for computers produced in very large numbers.

Bye

I worked with large Collins racks made for NASA. Maze of white Teflon wires. I'm not thinking they were wire wrap.

I was pretty good at screwing up wirewrap wiring changes in equipment. Once tied 5 MHz to ground. Everywhere, 5 MHz. TTL.

Greg

Does it come with Spacewars?

"The atmosphere of academic freedom at MIT allowed some nontraditional research to take place: Graduate students began playing Space War ? the first computer game ? on the giant TX-2 computer."

I designed a color graphics system for the PDP-11, memory mapped with barbaric AMS 1K differential DRAMs. I wrote the first app for it in assembly, Conway's Game of Life.

l_2050/

No, kids, it wasn't John Walker.

That's cred.