[mythtv-users] The Smaller... Disk contest, Fall 2007 edition

[Brian Wood]

Yan Seiner wrote:
> Brian Wood wrote:
>> Good grief. I used to work with PDP-8/L machines. A "massive" 4K of core
>> memory (real cores) and punched paper tape for I/O. This was a 12-bit
>> Octal machine.
>>
>> I really hated those ASR-33 teletypes, but we did have a "high-speed"
>> tape reader - 200 CPS :-)
> 
> The place where I was was too cheap to buy real teletype paper, so we 
> would steal the paper towel rolls from the bathrooms and use those in 
> the ASR33s....

I'll bet that gunked up the print head pretty quickly.

> 
> Our tape reader was the one that was attached to the ASR33 - what, 15 
> CPA?  30?  thankfully, I forget.

It was 10 Characters per second, same as the printer. I used to love
loading tape for 30 or 40 minutes and then getting "checksum error" at
the end :-)

The ASR-33 was an outgrowth of the model 32, which ran at 60 speed and
was pretty reliable. Pushing it to 100 speed caused it to sell a lot
more parts for the Teletype Corporation.

> 
> We would program the PDP8 to play music - the CPU would leak AM 
> frequencies so you could get it to play music by repeating certain 
> instructions and holding an AM radio nearby.  (OK, at least we're back 
> on topic of entertainment.  :-) )

Yeah, we did that too. We tried to get speech synthesized but just
couldn't do it, the "music" was of about the same quality as the early
musical holiday cards, but with AM static added.

Actually it wasn't the CPU that made the "music", it was the
incandescent front panel lamps, mostly the accumulator ones.

beww