A brief tour of the PDP-11, the most influential minicomputer of all time

[tealtonerick]

I think it says a lot about the Fractal Audio demographic that a thread about the PDP11 is a hot topic .

Cliff and the Fractal development team has more computing brothers out here than they might even realize. My Computer Science degree is from the oldest department in the country.

 

[TG3K]

I think it says a lot about the Fractal Audio demographic that a thread about the PDP11 is a hot topic .

The vast majority of the musicians I knew and played with back in the '80s eventually went into careers that were heavily reliant on computers (including myself). That includes repair/maintenance technicians, engineers, tech writers, and sales people. Still, I think the average Fractal user (or at least the ones who frequent this forum) are more likely to be into the deeper stuff like programming than most musicians.

 

[HerrSquid]

I'm using it (among other things) to provision full SAP application deployments in Azure, including multi-terabyte in-memory HANA databases out of thin air.

It's great for system admin / desired state config. It can be a bit of a stretch for other things...

Yep, that's what it's for, and that's how we're using it. I'm in charge of operations of an HPC site for a research lab, and we're migrating a few hundred support machines from Chef to Ansible. There's a fair amount of work there...

 

[HerrSquid]

The vast majority of the musicians I knew and played with back in the '80s eventually went into careers that were heavily reliant on computers (including myself). That includes repair/maintenance technicians, engineers, tech writers, and sales people. Still, I think the average Fractal user (or at least the ones who frequent this forum) are more likely to be into the deeper stuff like programming than most musicians.

Yep, I think we self-select!

 

[unix-guy]

Yep, that's what it's for, and that's how we're using it. I'm in charge of operations of an HPC site for a research lab, and we're migrating a few hundred support machines from Chef to Ansible. There's a fair amount of work there...

About 4 years back we converted from CFEngine to Ansible.

For desired state, I think CFE is the best choice especially if you have many hundreds or thousands of devices... But it has a steep learning curve.

The Unix/Linux team I was on at the time was exploring a CFE replacement because it was just too hard for many to understand.

We chose Ansible for that and before we finished deploying it the company I work for opted to use Ansible as the primary automation tool for our "digital transformation" enterprise-wide

 

[spagthorpe]

They had a PDP in the computer building at the local university when I was in HS. I used to spend nights in the building learning to program. I mostly used the HP2000 that was there, because it was easy to find the account numbers for the different schools on campus to use for access.

 

[spagthorpe]

Big difference between Perl and Python to me, is that I can read the shit I do in Python a couple of months later. I look back through any of my old Perl, and I have to spend a lot of time deciphering what the hell I was doing.

I'm not big on either, but it makes short work of some things that would take a LOT longer to crank out in C.

 

[unix-guy]

Big difference between Perl and Python to me, is that I can read the shit I do in Python a couple of months later. I look back through any of my old Perl, and I have to spend a lot of time deciphering what the hell I was doing.

I'm not big on either, but it makes short work of some things that would take a LOT longer to crank out in C.

Probably has a lot to do with the Perl motto: there's more than one way to do it

I've done only minimal python, with my first actual program being an Ansible extension module to abstract a more complex REST API that would be really challenging to do directly in native Ansible. I find python to be fairly easy to read, but I don't like the whole concept of flow control by indentation

 

[HerrSquid]

Probably has a lot to do with the Perl motto: there's more than one way to do it

I've done only minimal python, with my first actual program being an Ansible extension module to abstract a more complex REST API that would be really challenging to do directly in native Ansible. I find python to be fairly easy to read, but I don't like the whole concept of flow control by indentation

I have come to see "more than one way to do it" as... not a virtue. And I agree with the prior post that when looking at perl from yesterday, it can be difficult to figure out what the author intended (including the times that said author was me).

Last year I ran across a scrap of allegedly-working perl that wouldn't behave the way I expected until I dropped a semicolon into it. I got what I wanted out of that and other tweaks, but I don't know to this day whether it worked right by the author's reckoning. To my mind it was broken, but maybe not to his.

And regarding the indentation thing: Yeah, it's awful, but there are lots of other things that are even more awful. You kind of get numb to it and feel somewhat freed from all the syntactical debris that other languages require to delimit control structures. Plus, if you get used to slinging YAML very much, you start to consider Python and its toolset to be forgiving by comparison...

 

[Renderman]

The first computer I saw in real life was a TRS-80 in the window of a Tandy (Radio Shack) store. I assumed you asked questions using the keyboard and the thing replied on the screen.
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX80 (Timex in the States, I believe), then a ZX81, then a VIC-20, a Commodore-64.....

 

[Joel.Brown333]

I grew up and worked in computers from TRS-80 and up. What I always thought was interesting was the people I knew who worked with IBM mainframes never seemed to think anybody would develop anything better or that the computer industry would evolve. They used to laugh at micros and minis. I remember our IT VP asking me why anyone would use email when they could just edit a dataset on a terminal of our 3090 and give access to others to read it. I left that company after a few years...

 

[sprint]

The first computer I saw in real life was a TRS-80 in the window of a Tandy (Radio Shack) store. I assumed you asked questions using the keyboard and the thing replied on the screen.
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX80 (Timex in the States, I believe), then a ZX81, then a VIC-20, a Commodore-64.....

Those references bring back memories - In early 80s used to bike over to an obscure computer store (they were all obscure in those days) to get the latest copy of Byte magazine n geek out over the pages of info on those early models.

1st PC I ever bought in 84 cost $3k - two floppy drives, no hard drive, state
of the art CGA color monitor, no mouse (DOS), 64 or 128Kb memory, something like that.

For whatever reason I think Fractal attracts computer nerdish types (all those juicy deep parameters and wild routing possibilities )

 

[Toopy14]

My first computer was the VIC-20

The first computer program I ever wrote...okay, typed in. Still, it was fun and I was hooked.

 

[CobraJet390]

"Soul of a New Machine" by Tracey Kidder is a great read on what it was like being a development engineer during the mini-computer age.

 

[Toopy14]

"Soul of a New Machine" by Tracey Kidder is a great read on what it was like being a development engineer during the mini-computer age.

This is another great book that shed the light on computer and network security. Great chocolate chip cookie recipe in it too!

 

[Renderman]

I remember seeing both of those books reviewed in one of the monthly computer magazines I used to read. (Would have been either Popular Computing or Computing Today.)

@ Toopy - I remember typing in an almost identical program (from Computing Today) into a Commodore PET at our local technical college (our high-school would bus us there once a week) before I got my ZX80. An invaluable lesson for me.

 

[Toopy14]

...at our local technical college

For whatever reason, I never took the two computer courses offered at my high-school. One was using the Commodore PET and the other was a punch card programming course, which was offered at the local college. Likely one of the few places with a mini or mainframe. I remember my friends that took the course, would grab their punch cards out of their lockers, all neatly stacked and in order. Of course, it was high-school in the late 70's and the cool thing to do was be an idiot, so those of us not taking the course, would try to knock the cards out of their hands in the hallway, then run!

 

[Renderman]

I took our computer course the first year it was offered in high school. It was taught by one of the maths teachers, who was obviously a keen hobbyist. He was the one who brought his ZX80 into the class which began me nagging my parents up until Christmas to have one.

I remember writing a program out in language called CECIL on some paper with a separate square for each character. It got sent off to the local university where I guess somebody converted it into punched cards and ran it on the computer. Mine came back the next week with a 'syntax error at line 10' style error .

 

[Toopy14]

It was taught by one of the maths teachers, who was obviously a keen hobbyist.

The teachers in high-school were math teachers too. When I was on college, a prof. who was a mechanical engineer and taught math, also taught me how to program in BASIC on the PET's which were networked using a MUPPET network. He also taught me UNIX on two servers (I think they were VAX computers) called Ernie and Bert. The guy was brilliant. He made calculus look like a kindergarten class. The guy who taught me calculus in high-school, went on to be the head of the abstract mathematics department at Queen's University...um, ya, no wonder I had no clue what he was talking about!

Mine came back the next week with a 'syntax error at line 10' style error .

Must have taken months to debug your code!

 

[jakel]

My first computer was the VIC-20....PEEK and POKE! lol

When I started college in 1983, they had just decommissioned a DEC PDP-8. It was in the hallway waiting to be taken away. It was the size of a refrigerator, but it had similar toggle switches on the front so you could select the memory address and the data, in binary, then toggle the R/W switch to store the data or command.

Same for me: VIC-20 and college in '83. My first programming class in college was Fortran, and that was the end of my desire to program.

In '86 I started work at a machine tool company doing electrical controls engineering, and we used a Computervision CAD system, complete with hard drives that would rumble the floor and a reel-to-reel tape storage system. PLC programming was done on either a Zycom (or Zicom?) PC that used two 12" floppy drives, one for the OS and the other for the app, and an IBM AT (cutting edge) with a 10MB hard drive.