old processor architectures [was Re: The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix - IEEE Spectrum]

[phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org]

To mention an example of what the PDP-8 was capable of: Back in the early
70's Durham College had a PDP-8S, which used a serial ALU
(arithmetic-logic unit), ie, one bit processed at a time. (I think the
register transfers were all serial as well. In those days, hardware was
*expensive*.) They had a 64K hard drive attached to the computer. The
drive was enormous - it just barely fit into a 19 inch rack and sounded
like a washing machine on spin cycle.

This computing facility ran a timesharing computing service of 4 ASR-33
teletypes, supporting the FOCAL programming language, which was an
interpreted language something like BASIC. It was pretty slow when you got
four people on the terminals and man, there was a lot of activity in the
carry-bit indicator. But it did work.

Of course, time-sharing is fairly trivial using an interpreted language,
but it was still pretty impressive in the day.

Personally, I found programming in PDP-8 assembler a huge chore and never
got the hang of it. The 6502 instruction set was a gift from god by
comparison.

Peter

-- 
Peter Hiscocks
Syscomp Electronic Design Limited, Toronto
http://www.syscompdesign.com
USB Oscilloscope and Waveform Generator
647-839-0325

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