Re: <bits OT> dbdebunk 'Quote of Week' comment

"Frank_Hamersley" <terabite_at_isat.bigpond.com> wrote in message news:HKZNe.6342$FA3.4435_at_news-server.bigpond.net.au...
> "David Cressey" <david.cressey_at_earthlink.net> wrote in message
> >
> > "Frank_Hamersley" <terabite_at_isat.bigpond.com> wrote in message
> [..]
> >
> > Hmmm. I started out with an IBM 7090 and a PDP-1 (That's a one, not an
> > eleven), From there moving on to PDP-6 and 10, DECsystem-10 and 20,
and
> > VAX. SQL came much later for me, after Pascal, Datatrieve, and VAX
> Rdb/VMS.
>
> Woot! How many PDP-1's did they end up making? As I recall my uni had a
> PDP-6 (with a single digit serial number) but I never got to play with it.
> One of my associates in the club I believe got it (or perhaps a PDP-8) to
> play "Fur Elise" by resting a transistor radio inside the card cage and
> executing a program of repeated instructions that induced the required
tones
> by interference. We used to use a PDP-8 running early Unix to cross
compile
> Modula-2 for an LSI-11 in the undergrad lab and the DEC-10 was the
recipient
> of my first <cough> crack. Apols to less nostalgic readers for suffering
my
> flashbacks.
> </OT>

According to this website
http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/DEC-PDP1-1960.htm 53. One of the ones I programmed was serial number two. A guy named Paul Samson made
good music on the one.

There were only about 18 PDP-6 computers made. Ahead of its time.

The DEC-10 was about the peak of my "techie" lifetime. After that, I began to be more interested in information than in technology. That's what eventually led me to relational databases.

My apologies to the less nostalgic participants as well. "... nothing but boring stories about glory days". Received on Mon Aug 22 2005 - 10:49:29 CEST