Wanted stuff (Was: Pretty good week)

From: lisard_at_zetnet.co.uk <(lisard_at_zetnet.co.uk)>
Date: Sun Mar 1 11:24:47 1998

[tony duell]
   :> oh, add a sirius one to the list; we forgot it.

   :Still sure you don't want to LART me? There's a few about - I was

"lart"?

   :given one a few months back. Strange machine - the disk controller
   :has a 8048-series microcontroller and a lot of TTL on it. It's an
   :8088 machine, but virtually all the I/O chips come from the 65xx
   :family, etc.

not surprising, considering that chuck peddle designed the 6502 in the
first place. he was especially keen on the 6522 and tended to scatter
them around his designs like confetti... ;> the disk drives used gcr and
ran at variable speeds, not unlike the mac's (although was the gcr
encoding method a more traditional 4 bits onto 5, as opposed to apple's
software-based 6-to-8?) and also boasted a capacity of 1.2Mb and a data
rate of 500kHz. and an 800x400 screen that took memory from the main
map, rather than its own little partition off somewhere else.

it wasn't a cheap design, but it was what the ibm should have been if it
*had* to use that particular architecture...

   :Yes, 'everybody's got an 11' - but it's the sort of machine you
   :should have anyway :-). IMHO it's a very clean architecture.

hmm. maybe. *grudge grudge* yes, it is a very nice architecture,
particularly in the way both the source and destination operands can be
specified as being in memory for all instructions (rather than just
loads) - but our objections to actually having one are not based in
rationality in this case...

   :And surely it's better to have a real PDP8 than to have a simulator

it depends what you want it for. we want it for the programming
challenge (what can usefully be done within 4k?) and it makes sense for
programming challenge phase 1 to be hacking out a simulator. getting the
real pdp8 is something we'd see as the last step, not the first.

   :Well, a Daybreak (the smallest, commonest D-machine, I think)
   :turned up at a radio rally a couple of weeks ago. It was the first
   :one I'd seen outside a museum....

hmm - so how much did you pay for it then...? :>

[tiger]
   :The design was sold to HH electronics,
   :who went broke (no idea whether the cost of making the Tiger had
   :anything to do with this), and the machine never went into
   :production.

probably - ram was expensive, modems were expensive, 7220s were
expensive... it would have been a hacker's dream, but for most
hobbyists, possibly overkill.


-- Communa (together) we remember... we'll see you falling
you know soft spoken changes nothing to sing within her...

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Received on Sun Mar 01 1998 - 11:24:47 GMT