On Fri, 22 Jan 2021 15:00:00 +0000
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.

Around 1980 I was working on a TV character generator based on the DG
Nova, another mini of that era. It had a rackmount main frame with a
front panel with octal pushbuttons, rather than the imposing row of
switches. About half a dozen manually entered codes, than it fired up
the paper tape reader.
>
> Or did you actually write naked assembler code to do things direct
> with the hardware?

I wrote a disassembler in machine code, then did some analysis of some
of the supplied programs.

There was an optional one or two hard drives, 1.25MB in those big IBM
cartridges.

The (TTL-based) Nova actually went out of production while I was with
the character generator company, so they made their own using AMD
bit-slice microprocessors, AMD2901, if I recall correctly. I believe DG
also did this for a later Nova model.

--
Joe

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