On 22/01/2021 15:00, Chris Green wrote:
>>>
>>
>> It is 50 years ago this year that I cut my teeth on a naked
>> PDP11/20 with no OS and only an assembler. Everything I did
>> was up to me.
>>
> Ah, but the normal process would be to enter the boot loader by hand,
> then a bigger/better loader from paper tape and then the actual OS.

Off the top of my head, having toggled it in so often (octal!)

16701
26
1272
352
5211
15711

EOE after 50 years!

> Or did you actually write naked assembler code to do things direct
> with the hardware?

First 10 years as a professional softy were PDP11 assembler
on SCADA systems. Most challenging ISTR was a cassette tape driver
to run under our own realtime exec.

> I started at a similar time (early 1970s) on a wierd device called the
> PDP-12 (an odd marriage of a PDP-8 and a university developed machine
> called a Linc-12).

Yes, I'm aware of that. Wasn't there some difficulty in on-the-fly
switching between the two instruction sets? I've the thing described
in a DEC sales clossy from 1971.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05