Could I build a PDP-8

From: Frank McConnell <fmc_at_reanimators.org>
Date: Thu Aug 14 10:19:26 1997

Hans Pufal <hans1_at_filan00.grenoble.hp.com> writes:
> The Art of Digital Design, an introduction to top-down design
> by Franklin P. Prosser and David E. Winkel
> Prentice-Hall 1987 ISBN 0-13-046673-5 025

Thanks.

Maybe this was a popular thing to do in the mid-1980s? The
undergraduate computer architecture course (1983 I think, maybe 1984)
I took basically went from gates to a PDP-8-like CPU over the course
of the semester. Somewhere at the beginning I think we spent a
half-hour on the fact that there are different logic families, but we
never touched on that again. (This was a Computer Science course,
Real Hardware seemed to be the province of the Electrical Engineering
department.)

> Talking of 16 bit extensions to the PDP-8, that is what the HP-2116A
> appears to be, anyone konw that processor?

By manuals only I'm afraid, and I spent more time fascinated by the
possibilities of user-developed microcode in the 2100A. The 2116A is
entirely hardwired, with two accumulators, 16-bit word, 32KW memory I
think. Oh, and stable across the same environmental conditions as
other HP instrumentation.

I suggest you webulate over to www.chac.org and look for the
plain-text versions of Engine 2.3 and 2.4. You want to read the
interviews with Barney Oliver and Joe Schoendorf in those issues.

-Frank McConnell
Received on Thu Aug 14 1997 - 10:19:26 BST