[SML] turning off light boards

[Dan Sheehan]

DEC PDP-8's in GenRad 1790-series board testers.
12 bits wide, octal notation for 4 3-bit groups.
Hand-toggled in a few machine code instructions to boot it up.

That was well back in BC

(Before Children)

On Fri, Nov 27, 2015 at 2:00 AM, Jerry Durand via Stagecraft <
stagecraft at theatrical.net> wrote:

> In the late 1970s I ran a couple of PDP 11 systems to control
> semiconductor testing in a pilot line.  I still have the hard disk from
> the first IBM 286 sold out here sitting on my shelf next to the
> prototype for the first mass-produced computer voice board.
>
> Ah, history.  That and $12.95 might buy me a soda.
>
> On 11/26/2015 10:49 PM, Steven Santos via Stagecraft wrote:
> > I used a PDP-11 in high school back in the early 1990's.  One of my
> > after school jobs at the time was assisting a friends father
> > installing and maintaining Digital Alpha and Sun Solaris servers, as
> > well as the workstations that went with them.  Had one client that had
> > 3 PDP-11's (a 55, a 65 and a 70 IIRC), 2 racks of Sun servers (6ish)
> > and  and 8(!) digital alpha servers (2100 series I believe it was) and
> > a home-brewed box they called "big bertha" that had a ton of hard
> > drives in it and wired to it.  No one ever told me what these guys
> > did, but we spent a LOT of time making network authentication work
> > right.  The PDP-11's did not want to work with Sun's network
> > authentication.  Neither did the Windows for Workgroups (3.11)
> > machines want to do it.
> >
> > I still remember being blown away that an office of 12 would have this
> > many servers running, and that each of these guys had a bleeding edge
> > W4W 386, a DEC term and a Solaris box (with 2 screens!) sitting on
> > each desk.  My whole school had 1 pdp-11 that powered 2 classrooms of
> > workstations, plus the school admin terminals.
> >
> > Now my phone has more computing power than that whole office did.
> > ---
> > Steven Santos
> > Director
> > Simply Circus, Inc.
> > 86 Los Angeles Street
> > Newton, MA 02458
> >
> > P: 617-527-0667
> > F: 617-934-1870
> > E: Steven at SimplyCircus.com
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Nov 26, 2015 at 4:23 PM, Kristi R-C via Stagecraft
> > <stagecraft at theatrical.net> wrote:
> >> DEC made tanks. I used to program on a PDP 11/70. I think you could
> have bombed it and it would have been fine.
> >>
> >> Kristi R-C
> >>
> >>> On Nov 26, 2015, at 12:32 PM, Chip Wood via Stagecraft <
> stagecraft at theatrical.net> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Did that in '75 when NSA retired their PDP-1 (Serial # 1) for a PDP-10
> back when core was core and NSA was only a little paranoid.  Ran a million
> cycles of random data thru it and they said that wasn't enough. So we
> yanked it and put it on a shelf.  That thing could still be there after 40
> years.
> >>>
> >>> Chip 1
> >>>
> >>>> On 11/24/2015 8:41 AM, Alf Sauve' via Stagecraft wrote:
> >>>>> On 11/23/2015 10:36 PM, Richard John Archer via Stagecraft wrote:
> >>>>> volatile core memories
> >>>> Never heard of "volatile" core memory.   One of the advantages,
> possible the only one, of 'core" memory was that it was not volatile.  It
> actually was a real pain if you were trying to scrub it clean of classified
> data.     Been there. done that.
> >>>
> >>> ____________________________________________________________
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> >>
> > ____________________________________________________________
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>
> --
> Jerry Durand, Durand Interstellar, Inc.  www.interstellar.com
> tel: +1 408 356-3886, USA toll free: 1 866 356-3886
>
>
> ____________________________________________________________
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> Stagecraft mailing list
> Stagecraft at theatrical.net
> http://theatrical.net/mailman/listinfo/stagecraft_theatrical.net
>



-- 
...Dan Sheehan
Fixer of things that break
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