Ken after reading both of your in-depth replies I find it difficult to believe you ever had time to meet/date/marry Peggy

Amazing credentials !

No wonder she thanked me when we met.

 

I started on a DEC 8i in '73. 32k divided up in 3 terminals with paper tape readers. The machine was the size of a 2 desks on end with one huge platter. It had to be manually booted from switches every day. First modem around '75 ran a whole 150-baud. It was a suitcase with a phone holder. Wow that was fast at the time.

 

When I got onto the "mainframe" (KA10 PDP-10) in 9th grade, there was a PDP-8i (put together by DCA) used for the front-end - just to connect terminals to so they could "talk" to the PDP-10.

There ARE emulators out for the -8 and -10's (and -11's and VAXen, etc).

I've resurrected some of my high-school software on one

 

hehe good one krewat. I can't think of anything I would want to ressurect from then, maybe an old Star Trek game or 'hunt the wampus', but I know I still have a bunch of that stuff on high speed paper tape. 8" floppys too, but that was from a bit later.

 

Ahh... the PDP-11, a marvel at the time. UNIX in its heyday. I spent more hours playing Adventure than I care to admit! Twisty little passages, all alike....


Have you heard of the DECmate PC? It was actually a PDP-8 desktop!

Wumpus... ugh!

 

Oh I think Ken smelled a wumpus. I recall the DECmate by name only, never used one. I switched to IBM mainframes running fortran, then Motorola 6800 and Intel with the 8080.

 

Ken, never played with an -11 until, say, 1981 - I can't say where

Yes, the Decmate - the first(?) example of an -8 in a chipset.

But as a profession? I never worked on anything as "small" as an -11 or an -8... -10s are for REAL systems people

If it ain't 36 bits, it's a mini!

--

From the PDP-10 simulator I told you about:

.R ADVENT

I'M TERRIBLY SORRY, BUT COLOSSAL CAVE IS CLOSED. OUR HOURS ARE:

Mon - Fri: 0:00 to 8:00
18:00 to 24:00
Sat - Sun: Open all day
Holidays: Open all day

ONLY WIZARDS ARE PERMITTED WITHIN THE CAVE RIGHT NOW.

ARE YOU A WIZARD?

 

[QUOTE=FTE Ken]
Have you heard of the DECmate PC? It was actually a PDP-8 desktop!
QUOTE]

We once had a DEC Pro 350 running P/OS... you can guess what that was refered to as.

 

Duplicate!

 

I once had a Vax 8530 Console that ran P/OS - it was a Dec Pro 350 inside

 

[QUOTE=xlt4me]I remember those as well. I had a ton of DEC explosure back then... my dad worked for them. Ah.... I see you're up to your Ul-trix again! AIX!

I foundly remember the wonderment I felt when I first sat at the console of a VAX cluster. Internet? I don't recall us calling it that then. We were just dialing in to ftp, read the Star Trek (or whatever) usenet groups and later gopher. The biggest use back then for us was to connect, telnet to a server in another area code (where-ever the BBS was we wanted to connect to), search for a dial-up port and dial out to a BBS. By-passed the long-distance phone charges completely and legally. Not that I ever, er, uhm.... did any demon dialing with MCI (yeah, right.........).

One of the neat things back then was trying to squeeze everything you could out of a system. I specialized in communications. I remember most things were 8 bit no parity with a start and stop bit. Essentially 8 bits of data for every 10 bits sent. I wrote a nifty hack that used the parity bit to carry data. So you got 9 bits of data for every 11 bits sent. It made file transfers slightly faster and at 300 baud (450 if you had a Hayes and hacked it) every bit helped!*

*8 bits no parity was in the PC world. I realize that most of the mainframe and mini systems were running 7 bits with even or odd parity hence the need for Kermit to transfer files. :-)

Who here remembers the NEC V20 and V30 chips? They were drop in replacements for Intel 8088 and 8086 chips. Pull out your 4.77 MHz (or 6 or 8 Mhz if you were lucky) pop in one of these suckers and your system ran about 20% faster at the same clock speed. The added bonus was they had an Z80 mode built into the chip. With the right software you could run 8-bit CP/M on top of MS-DOS. Not quite as nice as the DEC Rainbow which was a multi-processor PC back in 1982 (Z80 and 8086 CPUs) but pretty nifty stuff.

 

So let me ask you guys a question thats a bit off topic but ive been wondering for a while:

Ive been toying with the idea of building a new computer. I built this one years ago and still works great. However, i was curious about something.

When i built this computer, the process basically consisted of looking at parts stats and which one had the best id get. For example, say your looking at processors, some are faster than others and prices varied. Those would be the only things id consider. I got thinking even though say, for conversations sake, a 2ghz processor may work fine with one motherboard, it may work better with another. Kinda like how you could have a top of the line dvd player but a bad tv and you wouldnt see the results. Or if you were to get a high end cam, but not upgrade the intake the results wouldnt reach the max potential. See what i mean? Does this apply in computers as well?

Anybody can easily build a computer, but it can get really in depth with compatibility. I would also like to know more about software and basic maintence i could do on the computer. And i dont mean a defrag. If someone could give me a link that would be great.

Im going to go to school to learn about computers in depth but thats something i want to do on the side. Ive got a lot of classes i have to take first that are more relevant to my life, and those are on hold due to medical bull****.

 

Yea, those were the good old days! And learning this stuff was really fun. That was a pretty slick trick using the parity bit for data Ken! I had one of those V20 chips and I remember my first 30 meg hard drive that I thought I would never fill up. At work all the DEC systems ran DECnet long before everyone standardized on IP. Setting host to any other system in the plant, VAX mail, VAX phone, were all really cool stuff back then. When we first got connected to the Internet it was considered inappropriate to use a signature in your emails because it was a waste of bandwidth.

And viruses... we had no stinking viruses.

 

I recommend you check out tomshardware.com and anandtech.com.

 

No classes in highschool or gradeschool. Learned how to type when I was a 9th grader, but on a typewriter. After that, just started to play around on the computer and pretty much taught myself.