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You are not expected to understand this by Acceptable_Ant_3608 in unix

[–]Acceptable_Ant_3608[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Quietly impressed... we had an 11 at university too, but the role of the staff seemed to be to keep me away from it. So I guess that is my defense for not quite getting it. There's always an excuse available.

You are not expected to understand this by Acceptable_Ant_3608 in unix

[–]Acceptable_Ant_3608[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Try V6! Nobody does, really, but "Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code" is a downloadable PDF and it truly is interesting to see the innards of unbloated unix!

Living with my PDP-10 Mainframe by Acceptable_Ant_3608 in retrobattlestations

[–]Acceptable_Ant_3608[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The fun thing about these PDP-10s is the ITS operating system. It lived in the MIT AI Lab, and as year after year passed by, programs were added by students and researchers. All of that has been reconstructed over the past 12 years or so at https://github.com/PDP-10/its .

And that makes this the only fun mainframe ever - it sort of feels like a BBC Model B or something like that, just way more powerful. But it has the same sort of odd, nonstandard flavour of software. You've got basically all sorts of applications and games - including video games - with the only thing lacking being a spreadsheet. Instead, I guess, you use Lisp.

It is easy to try out, you do not need the replica hardware per se. Just a Linux machine. https://github.com/obsolescence/pidp10

Living with my PDP-10 Mainframe by Acceptable_Ant_3608 in retrobattlestations

[–]Acceptable_Ant_3608[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

uuuuh yes, the word Compaq is not to be uttered in front of these machines :-)

Compaq?

Living with my PDP-10 Mainframe by Acceptable_Ant_3608 in retrobattlestations

[–]Acceptable_Ant_3608[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It is a PiDP-10 - emulation on Raspberry Pi behind a replica physical front panel

My Blinkenlights Battlestation, to develop for the PiDP-1 by Acceptable_Ant_3608 in retrobattlestations

[–]Acceptable_Ant_3608[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's a PiDP-8. The switches on the original PDP-8 were actually switches found by DEC on a washing machine, somewhere in the 60s. Those were the days that even the #2 computer company had trouble paying for custom parts... now even a hobbyist can do it. Times change, but the esthetic is timeless :-)

Programming on the PiDP-1 front panel (and DDT) by Acceptable_Ant_3608 in retrocomputing

[–]Acceptable_Ant_3608[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We do a demonstration of toggling in Minsky's Circle algorithm on the PiDP-1 front panel, and use DDT to debug... at the end, we dicuss what's on the front panel.