#pdp 8

[dinosaurspen]

DEC PDPs & friends at the System Source Museum (Maryland Technology Museum)

Visited earlier this week. It was thrilling to see so many of my favorite computers in-person, and even see the LINC in operation!

Definitely recommend checking it out you're in the Baltimore area!

[commodorez]

PDP 8/L Restoration with FPGA-based Disk - Mike Rieker, Chris Randall

VCF East XX

[flowers-that-sing]

anyone interested in seeing me shoot a bb gun for the first time?

in case ur worried i do know about safety and i am well researched i’ve just never had my own and never had a chance to actually shoot one. i’m not like totally inexperienced/know absolutely nothing about guns.

[hardcoregamer]

PDP and Turtle Beach have launched six new Tekken 8 fight sticks that feature different characters from the hit Bandai Namco title. Costing $499.99, these sticks seem to be the top of the line with an integrated 6.28° wrist slope that reduces fatigue.

[sonsofks]

¡TEKKEN World Tour 2024 Regresa con TEKKEN 8 y Nuevas Alianzas con Grandes Marcas!

La emoción de la nueva era de TEKKEN llega con el torneo mundial 2024 y asociaciones innovadoras con Chipotle, Venum, Uniqlo y Victrix by PDP. En una apasionante competencia que tuvo lugar el 16 de enero de 2023 en Nueva Orleans, Louisiana, Bandai Namco Entertainment America Inc. coronó a un nuevo campeón en las finales del TEKKEN World Tour 2023. Arslan Ash emergió como el vencedor en una final…

[thevaultoftheatomicspaceage]

PDP-8 MiniComputer family advertisement

[oldguydoesstuff]

The KFKI TPA-1001 , a Hungarian PDP-8 clone (circa 1968). Built entirely with transistors and other discrete components, as even SSI ICs were not available at the time in Hungary.

[vax-official]

You might have heard of 32-bit and 64-bit applications before, and if you work with older software, maybe 16-bit and even 8-bit computers. But what came before 8-bit? Was it preceded by 4-bit computing? Were there 2-bit computers? 1-bit? Half-bit?

Well outside that one AVGN meme, half-bit isn't really a thing, but the answer is a bit weirder in other ways! The current most prominent CPU designs come from Intel and AMD, and Intel did produce 4-bit, 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit microprocessors (although 4-bit computers weren't really a thing). But what came before 4-bit microprocessors?

Mainframes and minicomputers did. These were large computers intended for organizations instead of personal use. Before microprocessors, they used transistorized integrated circuits (or in the early days even vacuum tubes) and required a much larger space to store the CPU.

And what bit length did these older computers have?

A large variety of bit lengths.

There were 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit mainframes/minicomputers, but you also had 36-bit computers (PDP-10), 12-bit (PDP-8), 18-bit (PDP-7), 24-bit (ICT 1900), 48-bit (Burroughs) and 60-bit (CDC 6000) computers among others. There were also computers that didn't use binary encoding to store numbers, such as decimal computers or the very rare ternary computers (Setun).

And you didn't always evolve by extending the bit length, you could upgrade from an 18-bit computer to a more powerful 16-bit computer, which is what the developers of early UNIX did when they switched over from the PDP-7 to the PDP-11, or offer 32-bit over 36-bit, which happened when IBM phased out the IBM 7090 in favor of the the System/360 or DEC phased out the PDP-10 in favor of the VAX.

[jhavard]

That time I had a dream about a PDP-8

[krjpalmer]

People's Computer Company February 1973

This issue of People's Computer Company included a type-in program adapting one of Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" from Scientific American and an article about buying a PDP-8-based "EduSystem" from DEC (the $8370 EduSystem 20 was held much superior to the $6960 EduSystem 10), with a mail-away coupon to be sent to Dave Ahl.

[dinosaurspen]

A PDP-8 computer used for calculating missile trajectory aboard the USS Oklahoma City.

[commodorez]

PDP-8 Computer Art – David Gesswein

And is that @regretsretrotech talking to David in one of those photos?

VCF East XIX

[postsofbabel]

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[ui-alcoholic]

Ferromagnetic Core Memory

64x64 bit ferrite ring (core memory) memory that can store 4096 bits of information. In the 50's and 60's, computers the size of a room had such memories. They were usually handmade.

The picture above shows the memory used in the Russian Saratov-2 (PDP-8 copy) computer. Check these out too if you are interested in retro computing

[turingalmostcomplete]

This is not a rowing machine. This is a PDP-8. His ass is not rowing.

[oldguydoesstuff]

I was in highschool in the late 1970s, and our "new" computer was a DEC PDP-8, that was five years old or so.

However the school was still largely running on punch cards, and older IBM equipment from the 50s. Attendance for instance, was handled by each home room teacher putting an absent students punch card in an envelope that went down to the computer room, a process that had probably been going on for decades.

There the cards were sorted, and fed into this beast, an IBM 405 alphabetic accounting machine. This is basically a SQL statement implemented in steel, wires, and relays. It would print off a report using fields on the cards fed into it, and could be programmed via a plug board:

I will never forget the IBM service guy coming in to change the oil on this, the whole bottom of it was relays that just kind of sat in an oil bath.

So if you have computer problems, just be happy changing the oil isn't one of them lol.