Classic OS's - EduSystem

From: John A. Dundas III <dundas_at_caltech.edu>
Date: Wed Oct 20 10:03:34 2004

At 8:59 PM +1000 10/19/04, Unibus wrote:
> > Thus wrote dundas_at_caltech.edu:
>>
>> > Which reminds me there used to be a series of "EduSystems" for the PDP-8
>> > as I recall. -25, -30, etc. The one I used was TU-55/-56 based, though
>> > one or more might well have been disk-based. Have any of these been
>> > recovered?
>>
>> Hmmm. Somewhere around here [*] I've got paper tapes of Edu-20 and
>> Edu-20-C, both BASIC multiuser systems for 8K+ PDP-8s. They were both for
>> paper-tape-only systems, say schools that could only afford the basic 8K
>> machine and a few Teletypes. (The Edu-20-C was basically an Edu-20 system
>> which could use Edu-25 commands.)
>
>Seem to remember RMIT's EduSystem used mark-sense cards as the Tech
>College couldn't afford the the teletype/papertape configuration. Was
>there a -15 version?

Yes, I still have a few of those cards laying around. Also have the
plastic template (sometimes) used to help code various binary things
on the cards. Quite interesting. It would be fun to find the right
reader for these.

One of the interesting applications for these was contributed to the
DECUS program library by a high school here in southern California
(Lompoc, or thereabouts, ISTR). The application was a football
scouting program. Specially printed cards were given to the scouts
to mark. The cards recorded each play in some detail. The data on
the cards were then analyzed by the program and opponent tendencies
charted. [I thought I had a copy of the program somewhere. I'll
need to look further.]

-15 sounds plausible from my faulty memory. IIRC, there were 5 or 6
versions of EduSystem, all with slightly different feature sets.

I think we've got a pretty good handle on the PDP-11 OSs, it would be
nice to develop the definitive list (and then archive) of PDP-8 OSs.

John
Received on Wed Oct 20 2004 - 10:03:34 BST

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