On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 09:06:03PM -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote: > > "Robert G. Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Note that Bob and I started out on systems with far less than 100 MB > > of DISK and perhaps a MB of system memory on a fat SERVER in the > > latter 80's. And the P(o)DP(eople) made do with even less in the > > early 80's. > > My first machine was a PDP-8. 4k of 12 bit words of genuine magnetic > core memory, and two DECtape units with some small amount of storage > (I can't remember, but I think it was on the order of 100k). I believe > there are icons on my modern desktop that take up more space than that > whole machine had for core.
Although it wasn't my first machine [1], I did work with an admittedly-old-at-the-time PDP-8 for a while in the early 1980s. It was used to run a Perkin-Elmer microdensitometer (think quarter-million-dollar film scanner). IIRC it had no non-volatile memory, and thus one needed to hand-load the bootstrap program using the front panel switches [2]. With the one I worked on, there was a hand-written sequence of octal codes taped up on the machine rack, and to fire it up you would mount a certain 9-track tape in the drive, toggle [3] the bootstrap code into memory using switches, and start it to running. The toggled-in code would load the rest of the OS from the tape drive. There was another version that would load the OS from a paper tape reader attached to the teletype, but no one ever bothered with it because it was such a PITA to use. Once you got it going it would read the data from the microdensitometer and write it to another 9-track tape (same drive, you'd unload the OS tape and mount the data tape). And once you had the data tape, you'd take it over to a PDP-11 and process the image using routines coded in Forth... Anyway, this is a good example of the sort of expectation management that many of us went through in those early days. By comparison, even ed starts to look pretty darned functional. Did I ever mention the months of my life I lost to an attempt to get TeX to (a) compile and run in TSO on OS/MVS, and (b) get it to generate output for an IBM 3820 remote SNA-attached laser printer? I suppose the bright side, we didn't have to trouble ourselves with firewalls, encryption, virus scanners, security patches, or in many cases even authentication systems... > > vi back then was little more than a shell on ed IIRC > > It was (for nvi, is) the visual mode of ex, which is/was an extended > line editor in the lineage of ed, kind of an extended ed. Correct. In ex you would enter the command "vi" at the colon-prompt to enter visual mode. You should still be able to do this on any system with vi installed -- give it a try! :-) FWIW, the shell command "vi" simply fires up ex in that mode to start with. --Bob [1] that was an IBM 1130 which bootsrapped off a single, 80-column puchcard containing a small amount of object code. [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Multiplex-80_after_30_years.jpg [3] You would enter the address you wanted to start at in octal (actually just binary grouped into three digits) using the switches -- IIRC up for "1" and down for "0", and then throw another switch that would load that number into the address register. Then you'd reset the switches to the pattern for the data you wanted there, and throw the "deposit" switch. Again IIRC as long as you were loading data into sequential addresses, it would auto-increment the address register, so from then on you needed only to keep entering each data value and pressing the deposit switch. And as long as I'm blathering about toggling things in from the front panel, I will go ahead and mention that I'm just old enough to have once been invited over to the home of one of my college professors to see this new Altair 8800 thing he was putting together... _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
