4 ms·
This is what I loved about the PDP-11 series. The instruction opcodes were so painfully obvious you could read them in octal. I would use a hand punch to crea
by daly 2y ago
This is what I loved about the PDP-11 series. The instruction opcodes were so
painfully obvious you could read them in octal.
I would use a hand punch to
create holes in paper tape that was the program. (Just a metal block with holes
drilled and a metal dowel to punch the tape).
"Patching the tape" involved finding a section of code that could be "overpunched"
to be a jump instruction to the current end of tape where you could punch in a subroutine and a return statement.
If all else failed you'd create a "patch tape" that was read after the original
tape and overwrote memory locations.
It was all very convenient since you could "single step" the program from the
front panel and watch the registers change.
Life got really sweet when the new teletype had a reader/punch.
Good times.