Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff
So a friend handed me PIDP 8 and PIDP 11 kits to build for him today.
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Housedad:
A very old friend who I have not seen for some time dropped by today.  He lives about 400 miles away now so I don't get to see him much. 

He brought in a tote and said that he had a favor to ask.  He had both a  PDIP 8 and a PDIP 11 replica kits in there and asked if I would assemble them for him.  He felt that his soldering skills and equipment was not up to the task. 

This is going to be fun.  Just the kind of thing I love to do.  Lots of through hole!!  Seriously, I love to do this stuff.

So I'm going to have a bit of fun for the next few days.  Back in the day, in high school, we both were about the only kids in our school that bothered to use the PDP-8 that was in the math resource center.  We were considered the nerds of the school.  At college, we both used PDP-11's. This is going to be a trip down memory lane. playing with the software and flipping switches. Blinky lights at it's best.  :)

Here's a link to the site:

https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence




MarkF:
Ah.  The good old days.
We used PDP-11/55s where I worked for many years.

   
rrinker:
 I keep looking at those. In college, we had a DEC 20, but I didn't use that very much, the engineering stuff was almost all on the CDC Cyber 730 (upgraded while I was there to an 830). But in my first job post graduation, we bought a piece of equipment controlled by a PDP 11/23 which, with a lot of scrubbing and TLC, I was able to bring fully functional, and in the process learned a lot about RSX/11 which was the OS it was supplied with (the DEC at school had TOPS). Plus I got to use my FORTRAN programming skills to write programs for it.  For a while I thought it would be fun to have something similar. Though the 11/23 did not have a full front panel like other models of the 11 series. ANd of course the PDP 8 is a classic as well - I first saw one when they took us to tour the vocational program for school, there was a computer science program of sorts and they had a PDP 8. And I found in the library we used to go to, a pair of PDP 8 manuals, which I checked out and read through several times. All a bunch of nostalgia, perhaps pone of these days I will get one of those PIDPs.
westfw:
DEC20s were wonderful beasts.  "full mainframe" (50-100 users) rather than a minicomputer, and an entirely different architecture than PDP8 or PDP11.   I spent the first six years or so of my career doing "systems programming" on DEC20s.Alas, I haven't been very interested in setting up any of the emulators that are available.  :-(
Housedad:
It sure was a long time ago.  The PDP8 was high school 1973 through 1976.
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