PDP-8/MINICOMPUTER THREAD

Can you imagine having to pay money to keep refilling your line printer just to use the UNIX command line?

>>62436138
>how fun is it?
Burning money on tech autism isn't fun, anon..

>>62436213
video terminal anyone? those teletypes and line printers are insufferable. the one in the pictures has over 500 oil points and needs nasty oiled punch tape.

>>62436229
yes it is. pdp 8s are the best!

>>62436213
Literally did my Physics home work that way, way back in time. The best part was that after several wrong answers the system would get abusively rude.

>>62437022
How old are you?

>>62437165
55.

>>62437208
i wonder, what job do you have now?

>>62437257
[spoiler]Programmer, mostly embedded systems controlling power electronics, with the occasional SCADA element using MODbus or DNP3. It's not sexy (neither am I), but it pays the bills.[/spoiler]

>>62437314
so, cell phone towers?

i worked in a embedded product manufactory. 90% of people young and it's mostly the programmers.

was asking because i'm constantly afraid of being very easy to be kicked out of a job because the number of young students willing to work almost for free while doing college.

>>62437484
Energy strorage, utility sized PV inverters (500 KW is a small system), and the monitoring and reporting software that they need.
>i'm constantly afraid of being very easy to be kicked out of a job
Me too. But, I keep getting called in to fix the things that those young and cheap programmers fuck up by being being young, overconfident, and not paranoid enough for embedded programming. Hopefully that'll last a few more years.

>>62437572
worst is i'm actually young, so i'm seeing myself not reaching the double of my age employed. oh well. beer in the park.

oh, nice job. where i worked we had a python/web interface for a PLC and they where trying to obtain data over CAN buses from the products being tested/powered (and store the 'passed' in the server). what a constant mess of python crashes was it.

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>>62436138
I've fucked around with them at museums and with some pretty accurate emulators, blinkenlights make mundane shit pretty entertaining and they'd probably be pretty fun to work with if you're a creative programmer.
>>62436213
Fuck that, at least the VT05 and VT52 exist though.

>>62437627
>worst is i'm actually young, so i'm seeing myself not reaching the double of my age employed.
Honestly, keep working on new tech, even if it's only for show at home. Especially stay up with the tools that claim they'll replace you. Right now, model based development is pushing out controls programmers at my client companies, but they still don't do a good job dealing with user interaction and comms. "It works great until we need to tell it to do something new", is where I say,"For a hundred burger-bucks an hour, I'll make it sing and dance."
>PLC and they where trying to obtain data over CAN buses from the products being tested/powered (and store the 'passed' in the server). what a constant mess of python crashes was it.
I have a soft spot for CAN based systems, since I spent years bending one to my will.
Always separate data acquisition from presentation. Ideally, the people making your web app only have a description of the in memory representation of the system with no clue how the data gets into that representation.

>>62437693
the vt52 is the shit! that thing looks cool as hell and it actually supports graphics, making it possible to make a gui for the PDP 8 if you are a good enough coder

>>62437748
the lead engineer was very fond of it also.

his theory was actually that using windows as man in the middle for his python + linux server and the product testing was the problem, as the boards booted perfectly and communication over the bus was done properly.

others were blaming it on the programmable multimeter.

>>62437764
That would be cool as fuck, I don't think it is possible though. I was wiki-surfing the VT55 graphics option and some other shit and seems like it's only really suited for graphing, I just can't see the 8 holding up all that well either with all of the shit you'd have to run on it to get a useful graphical system going.

But maybe you can, I'd like to see somebody do it. Then I can jerk off to the PDP-8's true workstation past that never was.

>>62437908
i will try it. i will have to bust my ass at work to pay for one though. if you upgraded the thing to 32k of core and used a faster baud rate it might work. that would require hardware hacking i think and the programming would be an immense task. you could use the ADC as a primitive analog mouse and you could probably get away with a single tasking gui shell for os8 with nonmovable objects and full screen windows at all times. then you could just use the icons like batch files to execute scripts of os8 commands to perform a task or run a program. like a REALLY primitive version of windows 1.01. that way you could use the existing standards, drivers, file systems, etc. without needing to make your own, ensuring backcompatibility

>>62437864
Hardware level error checking, collision management, and priority handling is hard to beat.
I'm not saying Windows sucks for any kind of control system, I'm just saying that QNX, Linux (with real time extensions) or LynxOS is a much better choice.
>others were blaming it on the programmable multimeter.
From a software dev prospective, always blame the hardware. The hardware people can prove it isn't their fault much easier than I can prove that it isn't the software at fault.

>>62438005
Might work. Have you ever fucked with this emulator? I shill the shit out of it because it feels pretty damn close to the real thing, might be worth trying to figure out how to write a VT-52 emulation plugin for it
http://www.bernhard-baehr.de/pdp8e/pdp8e.html

>>62438166
hmm. thanks. it would be better to develop it on an emulator first as it will take months to pay for a real pdp 8 and any video terminal after i find a job(still in highschool). but once i get that working, how can i distribute it? there arent many pdp 8 enthusiasts out there and the few that exist hoard 90% of the available hardware driving up the price.

>>62438196
>but once i get that working, how can i distribute it?
What do you mean? Put the code up on ShitHub or something, or get a personal website.
>there arent many pdp 8 enthusiasts out there and the few that exist hoard 90% of the available hardware driving up the price.
This shitty meme annoys me to no end, you're not going to just casually pick up a fucking fifty year old minicomputer setup for $50 BIN in 2017, and it's not because of the evil collector-hoarder conspiracy of ex-sysadmins who rescued 3 or 4 systems their workplace was going to send straight to the garbage because literally nobody else at the time gave a fuck about them. The shit's hard to find a home for, it's huge and difficult to ship, and there isn't much of it left anymore.

>>62438562
what little is left is owned by collectors who are more than aware of this fact and wont sell a single bit unless they die and it gets auctioned or they go broke and need to get money to eat. there are literally guys with 20 of these things and mountains of peripherals in their garages.

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>>62436138
BTW, does anyone know how many Bendix g15s survived and how many are privately owned?

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>>62438606
oops forgot pic

>>62438606
>and wont sell a single bit unless they die and it gets auctioned or they go broke and need to get money to eat
Welcome to literally every hobby related to old things ever, get off your ass and start networking. Nobody wants to bust their ass for weeks to safely package and ship one or more fucking full-height racks' worth of irreplaceable computing history to some inexperienced high schooler they've never met who has barely fired up an emulator of the system to begin with, it's not worth their time and the chump change they'd get out of it and for a lot of people who know what they have, it's not at all comforting either. The shit's heavy and rare, it's going to cost a lot whether or not some guy in buttfuck nowhere has 2 or 20 of them that he rescued from his workplace dumpster probably after maintaining them for a decade.

I seriously hope you find one of your own eventually, but come the fuck on.

>>62438928
what's "networking"? you think i can just meet people that have these things on the street? you can ship a pdp by wrapping it in bubble wrap like anything else. its not all that special of a process

>>62436138

When I was in college, I worked for the Corps of Engineers. I was attempting to reverse-engineer a system that polled a series of gauges all around the region. The system was a PDP-11.

Nobody had any real documentation for it. I had to pore over printouts of the assembly language source that had pretty excellent comments in it. Nothing to give an overview, but enough that I could figure out how to duplicate most processes.

For example, I could figure out the string of characters it sent out over the weird, proprietary network, but I couldn't tell you what the characters actually *meant*.

Anyway, after spending something like a year on this system, I casually mentioned it to someone visiting from another location and he was like, "oh, yeah, we have all the documentation for that."

Motherfuckers. They had all the docs and hoarded them. Nobody else in the entire organization had any idea that there was any documentation of the system anywhere.

The federal government is an absolute shit-show of fiefdoms and passive-aggressive bullshittery. Then again, so was almost every company I've ever worked for, including startups > 10 people!

>>62438612
>Bendix
The tomorrow people?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bul7m3jN25Q

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>>62438993
>mfw- i spend $3000 dollars and 2 years looking for a running PDP 8 only to discover that the only reason they are worth so much is because 4 or 5 old fuckers have the entire market supply in their garages

>>62439044

There's a good life lesson for you.

Always write documentation that *looks* complete and correct, but leaves out critical information required to really understand a system.

Always document the what, not the why. If your manager complains, document the why, but do it incorrectly. Make up acronyms.

Hoard in-house system knowledge like those geezers hoarded old PDPs.

And that, my friends, is how you guarantee your employment.

>>62439121
cant wait until they die and the market is flooded with them. ebay is all i can ever find, though so i dont know how that will work

>>62438983
>what's "networking"? you think i can just meet people that have these things on the street?
Meet people at work, on the street, on forums, whatever the fuck. If you want it cheap, you have to work for it, just like all the evil collectors you bitch about.
>you can ship a pdp by wrapping it in bubble wrap like anything else. its not all that special of a process
I think you're either baiting me or you really just have no fucking idea what you're getting into at this point, you don't just wrap a fucking huge-ass minicomputer full of all kinds of fragile components in a couple shitty layers of bubble wrap and throw it in a flimsy box, that's the kind of shit you ship in crates by freight or pick up yourself.
>>62439138
Yeah, don't hold your breath. It will go to a local auction house at best.

>>62439214
what forums would be good to look in?

>>62439261
Shit like VCFed and Nekochan are full of people with exotic tastes. Most people into big iron seem like mailing list-y types, fuck you could probably hit the SDF bulletin board too. Check the marketplace sections often on the former two, most of those guys don't sell their shit when they need to purge it, they just give it away to whoever will pick it up.

But don't force yourself into the shit with some specific goal, because all you're going to get is disappointment and fuck yous from being too pushy, and in the end you'll probably end up meeting the right person in a different place anyway. I found a cache of big iron shit (mostly just terminals) once when I was scouting out buildings for a family business, the other day a guy I play fucking Pokemon Go with offered me a boxed TAM and a bunch of other Apple shit that was just taking up space in his garage.

>>62439381
thanks. But why on earth would they just give me a PDP? would they do that of you were "worthy" enough or something?

>>62439454
If you've got some shit taking up space that you aren't doing anything with and you know someone who would kill for it, wouldn't you want to give it to them?

Or if your wife is pissed off and wants a big-ass rack the fuck out of the garage right this second, why send it to a landfill if you can get it to someone who might at least give it a chance? Shit's not worth the effort to sell.

I've got remote access to a PDP-11 running Version 7 UNIX and a VAX-11/785 running VMS 7.3, it's pretty fun to mess around with them.