Author: Stephen Davies Date: To: hampshire Subject: Re: [Hampshire] Installing extra programs on a freshinstall,
of Kubuntu
I taught myself to touch type when I was a student at PCL. I wrote a
cross assembler for the Nat Semi IMP16P (yep 16bit microprocessor when
intel had just moved from 4 to 8 bits...) on punched cards (1254 to be
exact) in SOFOR ( Southampton University Fortran) on an ICL 1901. Then
the PDP 11/40 arrived and I copied the cards to punched tape (much
easier to patch the binary...) and then loaded into the DEC using Dos
V8. The system had 28Kwords (56Kb) of ram and one 2.4Mb RK05 disk that
held the Operating system, utilities and fortran compiler plus
application code.
The PDP 11/40 still had to have its bootstrap loaded in via the front panel.
The Nat Semi system came with 4kb or RAM and a front panel but no O/S. I
loaded the initial programs into ram via the front panel. Usually, this
was the paper tape boot loaded which loaded the binary tapes produced on
the PDP 11 into memory. This was my first experience of writing Position
Independant Code.
My editor of choice was 'Teco'. It could even edit binary files. Almost
as weird syntax as emacs though.
Things went downhill (or made easier) when DOC was upgraded to RSX11-B.
This was all in the 1974/75 timeframe.
Going back further, I played with my first computer program in 1969 on a
Honeywell DDP-124 that was powering a Boeing 727 Flight Simulator for
Lufthansa.
Those were the days. Real computers...They did what you told them to.
Not what some idiot in M$ tells it to in preference to your commands but
that is another very big can of worms.
Stephen D
(55 today)
