[GTALUG] Laptop recommendations?

[David Mason]

Waaaaay off-topic, but this reminds me of writing “Cold Start” cards for the IBM 1130. A card had 80 columns and 12 rows, so you had 80 words of program but the instructions needed to be carefully chosen because you only had 12 bits and the other 4 bits were filled in by hardware.

The standard one moved itself out of the way and then read the first sector off the disk. But someone wrote a “rabbit” card which would reproduce itself on every card in the hopper (typically you’d put a cold start card on the front of your deck and then hit the Initial Program Load sequence… so the rabbit card would destroy the whole deck!! One that I wrote basically made the line printer dance around the room (a.k.a. destroy itself if you didn’t stop it quickly).

../Dave
On May 1, 2020, 2:45 PM -0400, Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk at gtalug.org>, wrote:
> On Fri, May 01, 2020 at 12:14:11PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> > Yeah. I only used PDP-8 computers before floppies had been invented.
> >
> > You didn't have to remember the RIM loader for the PDP-8/I, it was
> > silk-screened onto the console.
> >
> > <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/PDP-8_I_Bedienfeld_%28simuliert%29.png>
> >
> > You didn't often need to use it since its only purpose was to load the
> > BIN loader, and that usually persisted (core memory FTW!).
>
> I wonder if the developers had competitions on who could write the
> shortest working loader program.
>
> --
> Len Sorensen
> ---
> Post to this mailing list talk at gtalug.org
> Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gtalug.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20200501/f3ebb896/attachment.html>