Focal and the PDP-8
Ξ March 18th, 2008 | → 1 Comments | ∇ Books, Coding, Geeky, Oxford, Software, Technical, University |
One of the cool things about being at a university [still] is that people discard rubbish that’s someone else’s ‘treat’.
Recently I found a ‘Programming Languages’ Volume 2 manual for the PDP-8 – and it’s become my essential bedtime reading for now.
The book’s full of great stuff about how you should ensure that you’ve a teletype attached, and that you’ve got the steam-pressure just right before turning the thing on in the first place!
It takes me back to a time when programmers were, um, ‘novel’, men were ‘chaps’ and girls wore petticoats [actually, I got a bit carried away there!]
On languages, the book talks mostly about Focal; which I’d forgotten about altogether [a blessing really], here’s the Focal code for the Towers of Hanoi …
I loved the PDP-8 though – keying in the bootstrap and forgetting to load the punched-tape was a great way to spend a half hour or so [oh, how I WOULD LAUGH at times like those!]
If you fancy playing with a real PDP-8[E] albeit remotely, then have a look here [you can even watch the machine operate via a webcam]: http://www.pdp8online.com/run.shtml
on April 6th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Peet –
My first professional programming was on a PDP 10 (Dec-10) – and we used Neliac. Now that was a real man’s language!
Brian