[GreenKeys] pdp 4 w/tty console ascii ? bcd? baudot? what say you Q

[Christian Gauger-Cosgrove]

Darn, to quote some internet fora I'd say I got "ninja'd" by Doug
Jones, and Jim Haynes.

However I will confirm, the PDP-4 did use a 28KSR as its console. A
copy of the September 1963 brochure for the machine can be found on
BitSavers: <http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp4/F-41D_PDP4brochure_Sep63.pdf>


There is pretty much no PDP-4 software out there any more, and
probably no PDP-4's themselves. The SIMH project does have a PDP-4
simulator, which runs on pretty much any platform under the sun
(Windows, BSD, Linux, OSX, VMS...) although the lack of software is a
problem.

The DECsys-7 operating system of the PDP-7 was designed to work on a
PDP-4 for backwards compatibility reasons (plus the machines are
related). And DECsys-7 does run on the SIMH PDP-4 simulator (and PDP-7
simulator, naturally), however it's not particularly usable on the '4.


Internally DECsys-7 stored data using a six-bit code, which was
essentially standard 5-bit
Baudot/ITA2/USTTY/whatever-you-want-to-call-it code, with an extra bit
to say whether the character is a FIGS mode or LTRS mode character. It
could be run with 5-bit TTY's on the PDP-4, or ASCII TTY's on the
PDP-7.


Links to the simulators and DECsys-7 software may be provided if
anyone is interested.


Cheers,
Christian


On 20 July 2014 20:54, Ed Sharpe Archivist for SMECC via GreenKeys
<greenkeys at mailman.qth.net> wrote:
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-- 
Christian M. Gauger-Cosgrove
STCKON08DS0
Contact information available upon request.