For those of you who remember

murphey

murphey

Touchdown! Greaser!
PoA Supporter
Joined
Aug 21, 2008
Messages
12,628
Location
Colorado
Display Name
murphey
Home Airfield
KFTG
Today is DEC 10!

And may Digital Equipment rest in peace.
 
I am sad that I didn't have the space to keep my PDP-11s. I had three 11/34s in the garage at one time, with several racks of gear. Donated it all to an electronics school... where it sat in a warehouse until they scrapped it.

Probably just as well. All I wanted to do was boot RT-11 and play ADVENT one more time.
 
I was a PDP-11 guy. 11/34 and 11/24 (and a few LSI11 instances). Amazing how complex an operation we ran on an 11/24, two RK07 disk packs, a mud board for (iirc) 24 users on VT100 and 220, and TSX+ on top of RT11. Might have had a meg of RAM (ooh!).
 
30+ years ago I lived on a VAX 11/780. VMS was a great OS. By today's standards that sucker was slow, but it was great in its day.

I took the DEC PDP-11 assembly language programming class in the late 1970s when I worked for the Navy. Never used it, but when I learned C some years later I realized that it was just a high level expression of PDP-11 assembly. :D
 
We interviewed a guy this week who volunteered for some seriously crappy duty as a contractor to NSA because he wanted to learn VMS. They're still using it.
 
I have a PDP 8/L and a PDP 11/34 in the hanger. The last time I turned on the 8, it ran a blinkenlight program I toggled in with the switch register. The PDP 11 was rescued from a scrap bin and I don't think it will run without some major work.

My first real job was with DEC field service in 1973.
 
denverpilot said:
We interviewed a guy this week who volunteered for some seriously crappy duty as a contractor to NSA because he wanted to learn VMS. They're still using it.
Click to expand...

I still have most of my VMS books.
 
I was a Training Device specialist in the Navy from 77-83. Did mostly electronics repairs for simulators. Started writing diagnostics in machine code ( 1 and 0 ) for Honeywell 516 with the old neon indicator/push buttons on the front panel. Discovered I like software better then hardware and never looked back. it's been a fun ride.
 
Great memories. I was a system administrator. About the only operating system I actually understood, compared to the IBM 360 and the Unisys 1100.

And today is also a great day because it marks 10 years since I made my second solo and actually began flying regularly.
 
I remember the PDP-11 in our computer lab my freshman year in college. 1974.

IIRC the main console/keyboard was on a line printer and we had about 6 terminals (keyboard, green monitor, 8in floppy) attached to it (network?). Ran Basic, Fortran, COBOL programming languages.
 
I took a job working on a pdp 11, in the early '80s, but since I didn't know anything about RSX and the VAX was just announced, I was moved to the VAX team and learned on VMS 1.1 (Ctrl-Y = crash:yikes:)

VMS and I had a great run all the way through Alpha OPEN-VMS 7.something. As the OS declined there were fewer and fewer of us that called ourselves "experts" so the compensation skyrocketed, until it nose dived. Fortunately, that was when I was ready to retire the first time. (That didn't last long).
 
Good memories from my days as an electrical engineering grad student. Lunar lander game on a PDP-11. Booting from a 8" floppy after setting a bank of toggle switches multiple times.
 
Boy, reading all of those reminders of a life I've long-since left behind makes me feel old and Cray . . .and maybe a little Bubbles-y . . .

A friend of mine has an old RTTY set up in his house. No paper, no ribbon, but it's always running, to "keep me company."

And YOU NEED LITTLE TEENY EYES FOR READING LITTLE TEENY PRINT LIKE YOU NEED LITTLE TEENY HANDS FOR MILKING MICE
 
denverpilot said:
We interviewed a guy this week who volunteered for some seriously crappy duty as a contractor to NSA because he wanted to learn VMS. They're still using it.
Click to expand...

There are still full motion flight simulators running on VAX computers at various airlines and training centers.
 
ColoPilot said:
There are still full motion flight simulators running on VAX computers at various airlines and training centers.
Click to expand...

I know for a fact that there are a few real-time systems out there running on PDP-8s. I'd bet good money we could find at least one with an iron-core ("donut") memory board.
 
SCCutler said:
I know for a fact that there are a few real-time systems out there running on PDP-8s. I'd bet good money we could find at least one with an iron-core ("donut") memory board.
Click to expand...


I lost my chunk of core memory. Got lost in a move somewhere. Was kinds fun to keep on my desk to see who knew what it was.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
Two of my souvenirs from a previous life are a core memory board (4-wire high speed buffer memory from an IBM 2821 control unit) and one of the MCM logic modules from, if I recall correctly, a 4341.

And, of course, a 2MB memory board for the IBM System/36 D-model. For a brief, shining moment there were three manufacturers of memory for the S/36. There was IBM, EMC and me. Then the AS/400 squashed the S/36 like a bug.
 
Back in the day, I worked on many control systems for the nuke industry. They were almost all based on a spec board and a PDP-11. Some of them had dual systems which they considered fully redundant, but there were no hooks into the A/D board for failover. So, later they started putting dual sensors out in the field and route them to separate A/D boards.

This got very popular after Three Mile Island went pear shaped. I was trained on support and a few sys commands, but most of my work was on the install and setup of the sensors and A/D process controls.

It was a great platform, very good utilization of the memory and CPU cycles. Most of the code was tight, and made good use of iteration and recursion. Today, code is comparatively crappy. Just use 30-50 lines which could be done by a good coder in 12 lines, maybe 15. Some coders these days are even worse.

There are still PDP-11/780s in work at Rocky Flats(as of last summer), but I can't tell you what they're doing out there. I think there are still some at work in a few nuke plants on the east coast and midwest.
 
NoHeat said:
So what happened that day? Is that when it was merged into Compaq?
Click to expand...

A DEC 10 was one model of mainframe computer, made by Digital Equipment Corportation. Actually, it was never OFFICIALLY a "DEC 10," the early ones were PDP-10s and the later ones were "DECSystem 10s," but while the company was called "Digital," the machines were called "DEC" by most folks.
 
docmirror said:
There are still PDP-11/780s in work at Rocky Flats(as of last summer), but I can't tell you what they're doing out there...
Click to expand...
Interesting ... all the 780 series boxes (Oracle servers) I worked on were upgraded to 8000 series boxes (8800s maybe?) while I was still there ... man, how long ago was that? Must have been 90-95ish...
 
gkainz said:
Interesting ... all the 780 series boxes (Oracle servers) I worked on were upgraded to 8000 series boxes (8800s maybe?) while I was still there ... man, how long ago was that? Must have been 90-95ish...
Click to expand...

You weren't in the lab I was in. You prolly can't get in the lab I was in. Machinery is a one way trip, so they don't upgrade often/ever. There was no DB/Oracle stuff on these systems.
 
We still make very heavy use of DECNET and a few other DEC technologies at work, including VMS....

Runs as strong as it did 15 years ago.
 
Do we share stories on April 20, too? I am ready for that one :-)
 
PDP8 was my introduction to computers when I was a plant engineer with GM.
 
SkyHog said:
We still make very heavy use of DECNET and a few other DEC technologies at work, including VMS....

Runs as strong as it did 15 years ago.
Click to expand...
Got any openings? I still have all my manuals, and up to 2003, was teaching VMS at a local college.
 
Wow; this thread sure brings back some memories. I learned to program on a PDP-8/e. I remember using the front panel toggle switches to load the small boot loader into core in order to read the full boot loader and the rest of the system from paper tape. The only output device I had was an ASR-33.

I did a high-school physics project demonstrating "inverse FFT" (in FOCAL, I think), with the resulting waveforms printed using asterisks on the teletype!

Unfortunately, that particular system was thrown away several years ago.

Lee
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top