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

[Bill Mullen]

On Tue, 13 Aug 2002, Jerry Feldman wrote:

> 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.

And the memories come flooding back ... :)

When I was a sophomore in high school (Melrose, MA, 1971-2), I got my
first taste of computing. The school had four "classic" 110 baud
TeleTypes, paper tape punch/reader and all, connected to an outfit in
Waltham (located in the former Control Data building on Bear Hill Road,
beside 128) called Systems for Educational Time Sharing (SETS). Several
other schools were hooked up to them as well; the only ones I recall now
are Newton North & South, and Canton High (since we could send messages
across the network to each other, I made my first "e-friends" at these
schools). The systems they ran at SETS were a PDP-8/E to do the processing
itself, and a PDP-8/I to handle the I/O. RS-232C disk, "high-speed" paper
tape, those funny little fat DECtape reels, toggles, the works.

The school put two of the teletypes in one of the Math classrooms (where
the lone "Computer Science" class, offered only to seniors and taught by
math teachers who had only taken a brief course on the topic themselves,
was held), and put the other two across the hall in the cramped office of
the Math Dept. head, a woman named Ruth Tentler. Mrs. Tentler was a saint
when it came to putting up with the racket of those horrid machines, as
long as someone was learning something. :)

Melrose was building a new HS at the time, and preparing to turn the old 
one into a junior high, so we were on "double sessions" in the older 
building (grades 10-12 in the mornings, 7-9 in the afternoons). I spent 
every free period down in that office, and hung around there after school 
whenever possible. Mrs. Tentler wangled me an invitation to visit SETS on 
a Saturday, and I got to see the operation from the other end of the wire. 
I sent away to Maynard for a couple of the manuals that I saw down at 
SETS, an "Introduction to Programming" book that IIRC centered on BASIC, 
and a book on PAL III, the assembly language for the PDP-8 series. I 
joined DECUS (I'm fairly certain that at that point, I was the youngest 
member they'd ever had), and set about to teach myself to program.

Before long I was getting the hang of things, and sharing this newfound 
knowledge in the afternoons with those Jr. High kids who also found 
'puters intriguing and spent *their* free periods in the Math office. By 
the end of the year, a couple of them had managed to learn considerably 
more than was even covered at all in the senior-level "official" course, 
which only involved BASIC (and didn't go very far even with that). My 
correspondence with the folks at DEC also got me an invitation to visit 
Maynard and chat with the folks in the Educational Systems Dept. there, 
which was run at the time by a tall fellow named Val Skalabrin (any of you 
long-time DECcers know what became of him?), where I got a glimpse of some 
of the things they were working on there, and gave them my take on things 
from an end-user viewpoint. I remember seeing in one of their brochures a 
tiny version of the 8 that could fit on a desktop, called the PDP-8/A; I 
remarked that if it weren't so God-awful expensive, I'd love to own one of 
those - I seem to recall that they found that concept pretty amusing. :)

Alas, the following year I was in a different school, with no access to a
computer of any sort, and didn't get involved with them again until years
later, when I purchased my first Commodore 64 and discovered CompuServe
and bulletin boards and the like. In those days, CompuServe was run on
DECsystem10 hardware (a.k.a. PDP-10), and once I figured out how to get to
"command mode" and saw my first "OK" prompt, I felt right at home. My old
friends like PIP and systat were right there waiting for me. :)

I have always considered that fact that my first exposure to computing was 
in a multi-user, multi-tasking envronment to have been a tremendous plus, 
as was the fact that documentation on the inner workings of that system 
was readily available. Every kid should have it so lucky, and with the 
help of the Linux community, hopefully more and more of them will. :)

-- 

Bill Mullen
10:27pm, 2002-08-13