From: Chris Green Sent: 07 July 2005 09:38
On Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 09:12:06AM +0100, Peter Hunter wrote:
Yep, you're quite right Keith, we should stop living in the
past. But
it is nice to talk about these things at times.
Later on I worked on many of the early DEC machines, PDP-8, PDP-12 (my speciality) and PDP-11. At that time all except the PDP-12 (which was a bit of an oddity) had to be booted by manually entering a simple paper tape loader in binary using the front panel switches and then loading the rest of the startup programs from paper tape.
Ahh, we used to DREAM of being able to "boot using a simple paper tape loader in binary using the front panel switches and then loading the rest of the startup programs from paper tape"
:o)
Mind you as someone of similar vintage and background to Chris I can't do too much leg pulling.
Do you remember the metallic 'paper' tape that was used for things like boot routines and compilers etc.? Used to be coloured on one side (red, green, blue) and silver or gold on the other. Made great Christmas decorations.
Regards,
Keith ____________ To know that you know, and to know that you don't know - that is the real wisdom. - Confucius