In <m0sRN2W-0007FLC@argus.lowell.edu>, James D. Howard II wrote:
>
>What is a PDP-8?
>
Well, sonny (cough! wheeze!), back in the old days all we had for toys
was rocks, with strings on them, and for fun we dragged them around in
the dirt, and we loved it! We were happy! And we walked five miles
to school, uphill both ways, and it always rained, and we loved it!
We were happy! And we did our calculating by moving peachpits from
one bucket to another, and we loved it! We were happy!
Then this here outfit came up with some kind of new machine, made out
of hundreds of little bitty cards, with six parts on each card, and a
hand-wrapped backplane that looked like it had been attacked by a
spider on LSD. And it din't have no proper memory, like peachpits in
a bucket, but had some kind of magnetic donuts, and not very many of
them, either, like just a few thousand. And it thought in octal, and
had 12-bit words because four octal digits were enough for anybody.
And it remembered programs on paper tape, which brought a whole new
meaning to the phrase "burning a ROM". And maybe, if all the cards
were stuck in the right way and the moon was in the proper phase, it
had 1/10 or so the power of a pocket calculator. It was pretty
decadent (so to speak), and we thought we loved it! We thought we
were happy!
A. B. "I still feed FORTRAN 4 to my NOVA to relive my youth" Bonds
..Thinking that the PDP12 is a better match for the MGB, since you
could also use the case for a garage.....
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