[GreenKeys] OT: Vintage IBM 029 keypunch

[Christian Gauger-Cosgrove]

On 12 September 2015 at 18:05, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> The LINC-8???!!!  Without looking it up on Giggle, wasn't that a version
> of the beautiful PDP-8?  The lab version?
>
Yes, and no. The LINC-8 is a "straight-8" (to paraphrase Scotty:
"PDP-8. No bloody S, i, L, e, f, m, or A!") with some some extra
electronics to make it also pretend to be a LINC. It's an interesting
machine, but apparently it's LINC side was done poorly (it was very,
very slow).

There is a lab version of the PDP-8/e; called the LAB-8/e. It looks
like a normal 8/e, except it's green and comes with a mounting box for
the various laboratory interface modules. There's also the PDP-12
which is another "we took a LIC and a PDP-8 and created a
frankenmachine" thing, except it was an 8/i on the '8 side, and
actually was a properly implemented LINC side (that was essentially
totally separate from the 8/i side) this time. There was also an
optional floating point processor that was introduced with the PDP-12,
that also worked on the PDP-8 series machines, the FPP-12 (and
upgraded FPP-12A).


> Now there was a great machine (the PDP-8, I mean); I started to write an
> emulator for it (I know, there are dozens of them already) until I ran
> into the intricacies of the dreaded OPR instruction...
>
The PDP-8 instruction set is nice; wasn't it one of the inspirations
of the RISC school of architecture design? Oh, and if you like the '8
you'll love the NOVA; de Castro's 16-bit PDP-8. I still like the '11
best though.


> Oh, and Happy Programmers' Day everyone (it's the 100H'th day of the
> year).  For octoids, I think it's March 4th or something (I've always
> hated octal base, for some reason).
>
You done gone and made that Hollerith constant too damn small. :P (You
know; since you can define a constant text string in FORTRAN 77 and
earlier by going <number>H<string>...)


Cheers,
Christian
-- 
Christian M. Gauger-Cosgrove
STCKON08DS0
Contact information available upon request.