3 ms·

It's funny to see the nostalgia for that when I know people of the time who went to great lengths to get rid of the clunky bit interface. My dad built a pdp-11/

It's funny to see the nostalgia for that when I know people of the time who went to great lengths to get rid of the clunky bit interface. My dad built a pdp-11/34 and replaced the bit interface with a numeric keypad and some 7 segment displays. You still had to enter bootstrap code but you at least didn't have to do it bitwise! Later he built an 11/70 and replaced the whole front console with a bootstrap terminal (with custom CRT driver if I remember correctly—ie, not off the shelf). That one you just had to hit the "boot" key and it would load the bootstrap code and do everything for you.

crististm 8y ago
It just goes to say that current systems lack something. We cannot always put the finger on what it is and backtrack to where we think times were better. Using these machines is the closest real thing to going back in time. I can see this with both powered systems like Symbolics LM or with smaller ones like PDP11, Spectrum, C64 or others: we lack the context in which they existed. We cannot bring them back today and use them as primary systems because we don't have the context that need those machines. They are doomed to be played a little and to be sent back to attic. Current systems lack the context of the old times and old machines are frozen in a time that is not fit to today's needs.
- rbanffy 8y ago
  It depends on how far into the past you want to go. Not so long ago, my desktop was an IBM PowerPC running AIX with most (if not all) the heavy lifting being done on a laptop (that lacked a 2048x1576 22" CRT screen and a model M keyboard). With X and an ethernet port, it was a perfectly usable machine, provided I logged on to the "server" on the other desk. One of the projects I will do one day (no time now, sorry) is a board for Apple II's that would take over the bus and use the text mode and keyboard as the console of a Raspberry Pi-like board. It's perfectly doable to take over the 1 MHz bus and use the compute as Z-80 boards used to. OK. That's not exactly usable as a work machine (not nearly as usable as the IBM, at least), but it'd be incredibly cool to be able to use a //e Platinum to work. Even if for a short while. The exercise of traveling back in time is often not as much as to use the machines for actual work, but to experience them as tools to learn about the context where they existed - the time we had manuals printed in paper, where we would debug (and edit) programs on printouts on wide carriage paper with green bars - to (re)learn the lessons others learned before us that we can still benefit from.
walshemj 8y ago
The later PDP's had a built in boot system and you only had to enter by had if that malfunctioned. The PDP11/03's had a monitor you could use to enter the code from a terminal VT52 or VT55

crististm 8y ago

It just goes to say that current systems lack something. We cannot always put the finger on what it is and backtrack to where we think times were better. Using these machines is the closest real thing to going back in time. I can see this with both powered systems like Symbolics LM or with smaller ones like PDP11, Spectrum, C64 or others: we lack the context in which they existed. We cannot bring them back today and use them as primary systems because we don't have the context that need those machines. They are doomed to be played a little and to be sent back to attic. Current systems lack the context of the old times and old machines are frozen in a time that is not fit to today's needs.

rbanffy 8y ago
It depends on how far into the past you want to go. Not so long ago, my desktop was an IBM PowerPC running AIX with most (if not all) the heavy lifting being done on a laptop (that lacked a 2048x1576 22" CRT screen and a model M keyboard). With X and an ethernet port, it was a perfectly usable machine, provided I logged on to the "server" on the other desk. One of the projects I will do one day (no time now, sorry) is a board for Apple II's that would take over the bus and use the text mode and keyboard as the console of a Raspberry Pi-like board. It's perfectly doable to take over the 1 MHz bus and use the compute as Z-80 boards used to. OK. That's not exactly usable as a work machine (not nearly as usable as the IBM, at least), but it'd be incredibly cool to be able to use a //e Platinum to work. Even if for a short while. The exercise of traveling back in time is often not as much as to use the machines for actual work, but to experience them as tools to learn about the context where they existed - the time we had manuals printed in paper, where we would debug (and edit) programs on printouts on wide carriage paper with green bars - to (re)learn the lessons others learned before us that we can still benefit from.

walshemj 8y ago

The later PDP's had a built in boot system and you only had to enter by had if that malfunctioned. The PDP11/03's had a monitor you could use to enter the code from a terminal VT52 or VT55