
Hello from 1978 - rbanffy
http://www.nycresistor.com/2014/05/15/pdp-11/
======
hughw
The 11/34 powered the Schlumberger wireline logging units in the offshore Gulf
of Mexico, beginning in about 1980. Schlumberger designed dozens of Unibus
cards, one as a controller for each logging tool. So most of the system was a
giant slotted cage for sliding the appropriate cards for the job, into. The
main peripherals were a TI thermal printer and keyboard, a tape drive, a
Tektronix display, and a continuous film recorder unit that captured the
scrolling Tektronix image. I found this image:
[http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-O6FC-
DLQI5w/ThWTeDxv2-I/AAAAAAAAB2...](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-O6FC-
DLQI5w/ThWTeDxv2-I/AAAAAAAAB2E/3C7XrbFekp8/s1600/Logging_unit.jpg) The PDPs
are lower left; behind the panel directly in front of the engineer is a whole
mess of Unibus cards. The most amazing thing about the system might be the
number of cards you could plug into it.

Edit to add: The plugin cards were way more than controllers. They were
(analog) computers too, fulfilling signal processing functions, and other
computations, the poor little PDP could not hope to keep up with. For example,
one device detected, I presume using analog circuitry, the peak of the first
arrival of a sound wave transmitted through earth and mud, across a couple of
meters. The card would report the time between the click and the peak of that
arrival, back to the PDP. Nowadays you'd digitize the signal and write a
program to look for the peak. Back then you designed circuits!

------
jzwinck
Fifteen years ago I was handed a Wang
([http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/WangVS100.htm](http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/WangVS100.htm))
and told to get it working. Apparently some company my employer had acquired
used this thing to store its business records, and my employer used PCs so
they just wanted to archive what was on the Wang then get rid of it.

The thing booted up but there was no display--the integrated screen was
somehow blown. So I got a suitable television and that worked, modulo the TV's
overscan clipping off the first character on every line. I then found enough
adapters to get it to print, connected a dot matrix printer with continuous
forms (just like Wang intended!) and printed every single document on the disk
drive. Imagine.

It came to perhaps a thousand pages.

~~~
jamesbrownuhh
Reminds me of something similar I did about 20 years ago as a new and lowly
employee in an HR department. Said department was part of a larger
organisation which of course kept everything centrally on huge mainframes,
access to said mainframe being allowed in the regional office by means of a
green-screen terminal connected to a dedicated line.

While the mainframe was of course the ultimate authority of what was what, for
everyone, our local department just wanted to do some basic employee
management on the then new wave of Windows 3.1-based softwares running on
local PCs.

But how to populate the PC data? Obviously retyping it was the only possible
way, and I was hired literally to do that and nothing else for a month. First
thing I said, naturally, was "why not just export it from the mainframe?"

Not possible, I was assured. The mainframe was a secure device for storing
secure data and no talk of exporting would ever get through the layers of
bureaucracy. The mainframe terminal had no disc drive or local storage, being
a thoroughly secure device with a secure connection through the secure
floorboards. And anyway, I was hired as a typist so would I please get on with
it for the next month, which was how long they had estimated would be
required.

An hour later the job was done - with no retyping at all, thank you very much.

How? Well, I'll admit to feeling rather too pleased with myself for knowing
that the terminal's attached dot matrix printer was not the only device that
could speak RS232. Connected the secure terminal to an entirely not secure PC,
and printed everything I wanted straight to disc. Edited the captured file in
Wordstar and fairly quickly had a CSV-type file that went straight into the
standalone software.

Although I'd effectively instantly put myself out of a job, they were good
enough to keep me around. I ended up staying for years.

------
johnohara
I took one computer programming class in college. PL/1 with a PL/C compiler
using punch cards. Said no way, this is absurd.

Three years later (after graduation) I was introduced to an 11/34\. Then an
11/44 with 1MB on internal memory and removable disk packs. On to a VAX
11/780, an 11/785, an 11/750, clustering, an 8650, a 6310, etc. I even built a
MicroVax I from parts purchased used.

There's a ton of us who still remember 30 and _60_ amp power supplies and
sequenced spin-up of drive stacks.

And we walked uphill both ways to our jobs with nothing but a TI calculator in
our pockets.

~~~
salgernon
Surely, you mean an HP 16c?

~~~
pling
I wish more people used RPN calcs. In my EE course in the UK in the 1990s, I
was the only person with an HP calc (HP41c and later a 48S). Everyone else was
TI and Casio.

------
ChuckMcM
Always fun, next up doing a SYSGEN on RSX-11M :-) I'm impressed that the RKO5
worked. The filters on those things would often decay into dust.

~~~
Isamu
Oh my glob, I remember doing SYSGEN on RSX-11M+. Haven't thought about that
since ... probably since I did it (a few times, don't recall the problem I was
having.)

Anybody here remember working on TOPS-20 on a DEC-20? And all the crashes when
it was in heavy use late in the evening before some big assignments were due
...

All the DECWriters in the room would simultaneously clatter out "%DECSYSTEM-20
NOT RUNNING", there would be shocked silence for 2 seconds, then all the cries
of anguish as everyone realized they hadn't saved the last few hours of work.

Good times.

~~~
greenyoda
_" Anybody here remember working on TOPS-20 on a DEC-20?"_

Yes, I did a lot of work on DEC-20s in grad school. It was the first machine I
used that was connected to ARPANET (precursor to today's internet).

I also spent lots of time on a PDP-11/45, although it was running Unix
(Version 7 from Bell Labs), not RSX-11. That machine had the old-style console
with a toggle switch for each bit:

[http://devilanse.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/6a00c22525688b8...](http://devilanse.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/6a00c22525688b8fdb0123dde0a34e860d.jpg)

To boot it, you'd have to toggle in the address of the boot ROM into the
instruction address register.

------
Aardwolf
So old, its capacitors grow hair :)
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/osr/13896638498/in/set-7215764...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/osr/13896638498/in/set-72157644327706146/)

~~~
Splendor
Or beards.

------
delinka
I want to know more about the "digitized monkey brains."

~~~
jbert
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_monkey](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_monkey)

[http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/scratch-
monkey.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/scratch-monkey.html)

[edit. huh - that's been edited to remove the actual story. Here's the story:
[http://edp.org/monkey.htm](http://edp.org/monkey.htm)]

The jargon file has lots of great stuff in it (also see "Magic/More Magic").
Some versions have had some dubious stuff added, but that's a big old ball of
flame waiting to happen, so I'll say read with caution :-)

~~~
liotier
And here is a picture:
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/osr/14043543694/in/set-7215764...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/osr/14043543694/in/set-72157644327706146)

------
kabdib
Meta-nostalgia is when you find one of your own postings in someone else's
nostalgia.

I feel old. :-)

------
Splendor
I do some work in OpenVMS so the video looks surprisingly like 2014 to me.

~~~
hnriot
does it still have EDT? If so then I'm sold!

~~~
Splendor
Yes, yes it does.

------
EGreg
"When faced with the bootup of an unfamiliar OS from the 1970s, “DIR” seems to
be the most likely command."

I would think "HELP" :)

~~~
thudson
Most of the disk packs have had the help files deleted to reclaim 100 blocks
so HELP results in a "?KMON-F-File not found SY:HELP.SAV". If the files are
there, it looks sort of like this:
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/osr/14008886427/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/osr/14008886427/)

------
nkozyra
Would love to go to a museum with a chronological tour of computing.

~~~
BjoernKW
HNF, the self-proclaimed world's biggest computer museum is the place to go
then: [https://www.hnf.de/en/home.html](https://www.hnf.de/en/home.html)

~~~
nkozyra
Wife will never allow nerd tourism, sadly.

~~~
Yetanfou
So go with some friends instead? Some things are meant to be shared with your
SO, some are not. She probably has some preferences which don't match yours as
well after all.

------
mratzloff
If you're into this kind of thing and are in Seattle, I recommend stopping by
the Living Computer Museum. You get to sit down and interact with the
machines. :-)

[http://www.livingcomputermuseum.org/](http://www.livingcomputermuseum.org/)

(They don't have a PDP-11/34, but they have a lot of mainframes and other
machines.)

------
fit2rule
The DIR in the video is such a lovely moment, somehow very touching to me ..
I've always believed we should not retire computers, and indeed have my own
swelling collection of old stuff that still boots and can be used for some
purpose.

Old machines never die - their users do. Keep the Expensive Machine running ..

------
owenversteeg
The rapid improvement of technology (even forty years ago) really impresses
me, especially considering that commercially available handheld calculators
were only available eight years prior (and were very expensive.) (I'm a
vintage calculator collector.)

------
mrbill
Enjoying old hardware like this is one of the reasons I've run a mailing list
dedicated to the rescue of old computer hardware for the past sixteen years.
It was originally Sun-specific but years ago we changed it to cover any
hardware.

[http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue](http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue)

------
nasalgoat
Man, it is so amazing to see the dates on those files! Some of those files are
older than my wife.

------
markbnj
Very cool! The last time I saw one of these was approximately twenty years
ago. It was covered with dust and lying under a workbench in the back of some
machine shop in a little town in Israel.

------
nullc
Always mount a scratch monkey.

------
benbojangles
The year I was born :)

------
zobzu
i need to get myself one of these. nice story!

