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#pdp

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petersuber

Update. "Scientists sue #NIH, saying politics cut their research funding"
apnews.com/article/nih-funding

"A group of scientists and health groups sued the NIH on Wednesday, arguing that an “ideological purge” of research funding is illegal and threatens medical cures…The suit was filed by the American Public Health Association [#APHA], unions representing scientists and some researchers who were stripped of grants."

A similar suit has been filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (#ACLU), the Center for Science in the Public Interest (#CSPI), and the Protect Democracy Project (#PDP).
nbcnews.com/health/health-news

#Censorship#DefendResearch#Medicine
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Petey P. Twelve

Hi all, we did our annual PDP-12 demo in Dr. Ted Pedersen's architecture class on Tuesday, and it went really well.

In cleaning up / reorganizing after showing off our artifacts, I realized that we have something that I haven't seen on @bitsavers, but I maybe just didn't know where to look. It's a big poster of PDP-12 instructions -- it's kind of like the pocket reference in poster format. It is about 9.5x30 inches (24x76 cm). I scanned it in two pieces on the office machine and stitched it together with GIMP. I'll try to make a PDF version with OCR text. @bitsavers #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #pdp12 #pdp #dec #umdpdp12

A JPG of a long poster of PDP-12 instructions. It is about 9.5" wide and 30" long and is in a "portrait" orientation. The paper is old and foxed with age. The text is black with a green border, PDP-12, and the "digital" logo. The content is similar to the PDP-12 Pocket Reference Card, available here: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp12/PDP-12_Pocket_Reference_Card_1972.pdf
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Petey P. Twelve

Our PDP-12 (#435) is able to read tapes (but not yet write them). This OS/8 tape is close to 50 years old and still reads well. Here we use the TYPE command to print a long listing stored on multiple tape blocks. LINC and DECtape was able to be used as random access storage (like a disk). The block numbers were written forwards and backwards on the tape so that they could be read regardless of the motor's direction!

In this video, we have a tape mounted on the top drive and have already booted. Zach requests to print the file to the (virtual) teletype, and the blocks of the file are read in sequence.

youtu.be/X_GP_L6hK6U

YouTubeReading an OS/8 directory from tapeBy Peter Peterson
#umdpdp12#dec#pdp
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Petey P. Twelve

PDP-12 #435 playing Spacewar! for the first time in over two years thanks to some debugging by us and our much more experienced friends on the VCF forums.

First, we noticed that minicom was inserting CRs in front of LFs when sending paper tapes, and second, someone pointed out that it looked like our 2nd 4K core was not inserted correctly (two cables were backwards).

The machine booted up like a champ, and April and Zach got their first chance to play the original deathmatch game. 💚

Spacewar! is being played on the PDP-12's scope. A starfield is shown. Two spaceships and a hail of bullets fly around a central star -- all drawn on a green phosphorescent screen with phosphor streaks. The PDP-12 green, black, and white console is lit up like a Christmas tree. Hands are on the right switches, controlling the switches.
#umdpdp12#pdp12#pdp
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Grant Me Strength

My office now has a #PDP-10 (because we’re a modern, forward-looking office) and under WSL I can log into it using a graphical (Knight TV) terminal emulator from Windows. We should then be able to use messaging apps and improve our productivity as we write LISP software and explore AI.

A PDP-10 recreating running on a Raspberry Pi 5.
The KnightTV terminal emulator running on Windows using WSL.
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Petey P. Twelve

Giving a presentation on the PDP-12 tomorrow, so Kyle and I did a little comparison of the PDP-12 and the Google Pixel 8 Pro:

- Of course, the PDP-12 is 12-bit (0-4096) while the Pixel 8 Pro is 64-bit (0-1.84x10^19)

- PDP-12 instructions vary, but are commonly 1.6usec each. The Pixel 8 Pro has 9 cores of varying speeds, but we estimate that it is around 1,300-11,000 times faster depending on how you calculate it

- The Pixel 8 Pro has a *million times* more RAM than the PDP-12 (8GB vs. 8KB)

- If crushed into a powder, approximately 7,000 Pixel 8 Pros could fit into the space occupied by the PDP-12 (a Pixel 8 Pro occupies approximately 1/7000th the volume of the PDP-12)

- A Pixel 8 Pro costs about $1,000, while our PDP-12 would have cost approximately $400,900 in 2024 dollars (it was $54k in 1972)! (Conversely, a Pixel 8 Pro would have cost about $135 in 1972 dollars!) In other words, the Pixel 8 Pro is 400 times cheaper than the PDP-12.

- Millions of Pixel phones have been sold, to say nothing of all Android phones -- while only about ~725 PDP-12s were sold. The PDP-8, a *wildly successful* minicomputer sold only about 50k units.

#pdp12 #pdp #dec #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #umdpdp12

The PDP-12 is a green, refrigerator shaped (and sized!) computer. It has a CRT display in the middle. Below it is a green CPU console with blinkenlights and numerous green switches. Above the CRT are two stacked tape drives. On the left side of the fridge, or PDP-12, is a green panel door (like those fridge-freezer combos with the freezer on the size). Behind the door is tape storage and other various controls. On top of the PDP-12 is vintage lamp, and next to the PDP-12 is a green Herman Miller chair that looks like it should have been sold with the vintage computer, but really just happened to be in the CS department here in Duluth.
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Carlos Rodrigues 🪣

The DEC PDP-11 is best known as the (refrigerator-size) minicomputer from the early 1970's where Unix came of age, but TIL it made its way into the arcades in the mid-1980's. 🕹️

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-11

The Atari System 2 used a 10MHz DEC T-11 CPU, an implementation of the PDP-11's instruction set. The "T" stands for "Tiny", its codename.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Sy

The original Paperboy (1985) ran on the System 2, as did Super Sprint (1986).

The "computer" on the table is just a terminal. The PDP-11 is the cabinets in the background, the most conspicuous element being its iconic control panel with its red and purple switches, and its blinkenlights.
The T-11 was DEC's first single-chip microprocessor. It has ~13,000 transistors, a tiny number by our modern standards.
The original Paperboy ran on the T-11 inside Atari's System 2 arcade cabinets. Most people probably remember this game from it's ports to home computers.
Super Sprint is another game that ran on the Atari System 2.
#retrogaming#arcade#retrocomputing
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Petey P. Twelve

So my old friend @spacehobo wrote an implementation of Hellorld! for the PDP-12, and getting it to run was quite an adventure. How old of a friend? What's Hellorld!? How quite of an adventure was it it? Watch and learn -- you won't regret it.

youtu.be/zcP_Dfgvuo8

(Nick also did a "takeover" of our channel and produced this video, so it is well above our standard sub-standard quality!)

YouTubePDP-12: HELLORLD!By Peter Peterson
#umdpdp12#pdp12#pdp
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Petey P. Twelve

This program is going to be a great basis for a video about how the PDP-12 draws characters on the scope... in short, characters are 6 dots high by 4 dots wide; there are many patterns of 6x2 dots, and letters are constructed by building each character from left and right halves. You can kind of see this in the way that the H has a gap in the middle of it. When I use the "auto single-step" mode on the '12 and slow it down, you can see the characters being written one half at a time.

@spacehobo thank you so much for writing this code, and giving us something fun to run on the '12 and a new thing to describe about how the machine works!

A closeup of the letters "HELLORLD!" on a CRT display. Each letter is made of circular dots drawn on an oscilloscope/vector screen (as opposed to discrete pixels, which are rectangular). The letters glow in a light-green color. Scratches on the protective plexiglass screen cover are illuminated by the glow.
#pdp12#pdp#vintagecomputing
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