Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 27 Jun 2001 08:26:55 -0500 (CDT) | From | Jesse Pollard <> | Subject | Re: [comphist] Re: Microsoft and Xenix. |
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Rob Landley <landley@webofficenow.com>: > On Monday 25 June 2001 16:19, asmith@14inverleith.freeserve.co.uk wrote: ... > > I learnt my computing on a PDP8/E with papertape punch/reader, RALF, > > Fortran II, then later 2.4Mb removable cartridges (RK05 I think). toggling > > in the bootstrap improved your concentration. Much later you could > > get a single chip(?) version of this in a wee knee sized box. > > "A quarter century of unix" mentions RK05 cartridges several times, but never > says much ABOUT them. > > Okay, so they're 2.4 megabyte removable cartridges? How big? Are they tapes > or disk packs? (I.E. can you run off of them or are they just storage?) I > know lots of early copies of unix were sent out from Bell Labs on RK05 > cartidges signed "love, ken"...
Ah, the memories... (apologies for the interruptions, but just had too ...)
RK05 cartriges looked very similar to a floppy case the size of an old 78 RPM record (about 12 inches across, 2 - 3 inches high). I never used them, but I did see them. They were among the first disk drives DEC ever made. Not the first (I think that was a DF-32 for PDP 8 systems with 32 K bytes of disk space). The raw storage was reported as 2.5 MB, formatted was ~2.4MB, with two recording surfaces. The drive looked very similar to a modern CD drive that would fit in about a 3U (ummm 4U?) 19 inch rack. It had 2 recording surfaces. It did have a write enable/disable switch. If I remember right these were originally made for the PDP 11/10-20 systems used for laboratory device control - chromatographs were mentioned by the chemistry department back in school.
I may have an old DEC peripheral specification book at home (11/45 version). I really liked those books that DEC used to put out. If you ever needed to program a DEC interface, that book had everything. It was almost like the engineers were bragging about how easy the interfaces were to program.
> What was that big reel to reel tape they always show in movies, anyway?
I think they were CDC transports.
> I need a weekend just to collate stuff... > > > One summer job was working on a PDP15 analog computer alongside an 11/20 > > with DECTAPE, trying to compute missile firing angles. [A simple version of > > Pres Bush's starwars shield]. > > Considering that the Mark I was designed to compute tables of artillery > firing angles during World War II... It's a distinct trend, innit? And the > source of the game "artillery duel", of course...
Or the 11/34 version of the Lunar Lander (load from paper tape, graphics display on VT11 - 512x512 8 bit color). It used to be distributed as a diagnostic tool (hardware level interrupts, dual A/D conversion via joystick, I/O via VT11). Any memory, DMA, or bus configuration errors would hang the system with a known diagnostic one-liner message explaining the problem.
I also saw a report of a "terminal warfare" event where the graphics display was being used for text editing when two little stick figure men would walk onto the display, pick up a line, and then walk off the screen. There was nothing the user could do until it finished. The text buffer wasn't touched, only the display buffer.
------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jesse I Pollard, II Email: pollard@navo.hpc.mil
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