My first ever computing experience was in 1977 in year 9 at high school where we were lucky enough to have a PDP-11/10 with 16K(!) and 3 ASR-33s and a VT-52.
Learned how to program in octal on the front panel. I've still got an old front panel (the rest is a rotting collection of wirewrap boards in my garage).
It had a multi-user basic that left out string functions if you went multi-user. You loaded the bootstrap via the front panel, which read the "absolute loader" from paper tape on one of the TTYs, which then read the BASIC interpreter from the same source.
I still have the small reference card with the instruction set and some old paper tapes around somewhere.
The whole structure of the registers with R7 as the PC and R6 as the SP and the various addressing modes was just elegant.
We used to make jokes that your programmed a PDP-11 with 3 fingers (octal) and a VAX with 4 (hex).
Comments
My first ever computing experience was in 1977 in year 9 at high school where we were lucky enough to have a PDP-11/10 with 16K(!) and 3 ASR-33s and a VT-52.
Learned how to program in octal on the front panel. I've still got an old front panel (the rest is a rotting collection of wirewrap boards in my garage).
It had a multi-user basic that left out string functions if you went multi-user. You loaded the bootstrap via the front panel, which read the "absolute loader" from paper tape on one of the TTYs, which then read the BASIC interpreter from the same source.
I still have the small reference card with the instruction set and some old paper tapes around somewhere.
The whole structure of the registers with R7 as the PC and R6 as the SP and the various addressing modes was just elegant.
We used to make jokes that your programmed a PDP-11 with 3 fingers (octal) and a VAX with 4 (hex).