'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)

Jerry Feldman gaf at blu.org
Tue Aug 13 10:26:35 EDT 2002


While my first computer was an IBM 7044 mainframe (punch card input only).  
after a few years in the Army playing knob dicker to grunts, I worked at 
Burger King Corporation. The Burger King POS was a 4K PDP8-E. No disk, no 
tape. 
The modem was a Novation modem card. We did the internal timing for 1200 
baud (at that time, baud was equivalent to bps). We developed our own 
protocol. The PDP8 was a 12 bit machine with data stored mainly as 12 or 24 
bit integers. We polled each store nightly from Miami. We had to write the 
code to strike the hammers on the drum for the printers. Since the PDP8s 
were core memory, power fail was:
save all registers (the 8 only had one accumulator and a 1 bit link). That 
4K system could do quite a bit maintaining inventory, cash, hourly sales 
and a few other functions. 
The keyboard was not ASCII. We had to read the row and the column to figure 
out what key was pressed. 
The code we wrote was extremely tight. The comm routine was vectored so we 
could transfer a new version. The steps we used were to first transfer a 
new comm routine to the scratchpad area. When complete, then update the 
vectors pointing to the comm and scratchpad. Once the new comm routine was 
running, we could transfer a new program. Normally all our data transfers 
used physical addresses, which were not very portable. 
On 13 Aug 2002 at 10:03, Brian B. Riley (N1BQ) ListAcc wrote:

> 	... hell ... as long as we are reminiscing about the good old days.
-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Associate Director
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9




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