Programming the PDP11, part 4 of 4

[Decrovis]

I watched all 4 videos. That is really neat. I really enjoy looking into the history of computers, it's absolutely stunning to see how computers have come along through the years. Thanks for sharing! BTW-- the geek girl is a cutie.

[martinusher1]

This machine's at the low end. I used an Elliot 903 for a student project in the mid-70s, it was an obsolete minicomputer that was also driven from paper tape. The programming system was much more sophisticated, it included Fortran-2 and Algol compilers as well as the assembler. I think the more upscale PDP-11s like the PDP-11/34 were similar.

[baronobeandip2007]

Great series! I just learned so much from this.

[lpasepok]

Haha, question:

Was there any LISPs for the PDP-11? I've heard that the PDP-10 is supposed to be the first "real" LISP machine so I'm just kinda curious :).

[DouglasHarms]

I'm not sure what the song title is; our students produced the video and selected a song from DePauw's collection of music that we purchased licenses for. I'll check with the student to see if he remembers. Sorry I can't be of more help.

[d46512]

@DouglasHarms I've never worked with a PDP11 but I can answer this question: It's the Eagles: One of These Nights.

[SuperMegaSamuele007]

What the title of the song???

[EricPiGuy]

@SuperMegaSamuele007 The song is "Smoke On the Water" by Deep Purple.

[supermatti78]

youtube.com/watch?v=TROnlvorhD­s programming will be easy in the future.

[siliconsurf]

no wonder suicidal tendency amongst computer programmers was pretty high during this era

[pulchritudovitae]

Thanks for this informational video. I've been born into a generation that started using computers when Linux 2.6 was just released.

[Murray06]

0:21 aw man, I want to holodeck out of the 70's to Smoke on the Water!!!

[SeltsamerAttraktor]

Now I'm going back to debug my C++ stuff ... it's gonna be a piece of cake ;)

[siliconsurf]

@SeltsamerAttraktor c++ is crap too

[9noitulover]

Where can I buy one?

[Muffysb]

How fun! Kudos to you all. It's one thing to read about how these systems work, but it's another to see them in action.

[ElasticMinds]

just finished the whole thing. god damn how difficult mainframes were. I remember seeing a honeywell 24bit mainframe at my old job, still running, and they had a redundent mainframe to do the debugging. They also had tape card emulators for running some of their programs. Was really cool to see, too bad i wasnt allowed to bring a camera.

[jekader]

Tara is pretty, but the clothes she wears are ugly!

[kinglonewolf104]

Who needs to store years as 4 digits anyway! BTW, why didn't anyone rewrite the year thing to use 2 bytes to store the number, and not the last 2 characters of the year? That would have been much better, and would have been good until the year 65536!

.

&eB

[nuclearthelab]

And then Richie and Thompson came along, wrote UNIX on the PDP-11 and pulled everyone out of the dark ages :)

[davorb]

That was pretty cool. Thanks!

[Styx993]

that was epicly cheesy with the holodeck, but it was still good.

[WishMaster89]

That was great! I just finished an Assembly Language course and used PDP-11 simulator (running on windows) to program. Didn't know it was much harder in those days to do what i did. I learned alot from this.

[ess1898]

Great series, I would have loved to have seen it go a bit more in depth and show using some of the other compilers like fortran for the pdp11. and perhaps show an actual operating system running with disks on the thing. Sorry about my post in part 1 I had no idea where this was going.

[STOPTHEEU]

@ess1898 Can we see them go to the future? :P

[quadibloc]

@ess1898

It's true that showing someone enter a loader from toggle switches and then use paper tape isn't really fair to the pdp-11 in general; however, this was an 11/10, the bottom of the line model. And with disks and an operating system... why, it wouldn't have seemed so primitive (although still like DOS instead of Windows).

[jeffr890]

This is an excellent series. In junior college, we used a PDP-11, but must have been a later series (this was 1981-2), because we had monitors to enter BASIC programs. We did not have to interact with the console whatsoever. This video series taught me alot about the earlier series and I find the paper tape very interesting. Thanks for producing this series.

[trashbird1240]

This is an excellent series: "Where's the mouse?"

[darijo203]

Yeah that was before any protected mode and before programs became bunch of large programs.

So some serious programming in c++ isnt easy at all. Assembly??? Well, try to program some simple task like sorting the data...

So yeah, these simple task mentioned in the video became very simple nowdays but programs have become too complex to describe them in couple of memory addresses.

[Vyggy]

True.. I would want to do that kind of programming. Java is hell. You can't even make a virus with it.

[darijo203]

Learn assembly and C and you will know computing!

[SecretTheatre]

What?! Nonsense! I use C/C+++ every day, but to REALLY know how to program you should learn LISP, in Alan Kay's words 'the greatest single programming language ever designed'. He also said: 'I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind'.

[darijo203]

"What?! Nonsense!"

Someone who uses C every day and claming that...now that is nonsense. And why should I care what some old man said? C is proven language through out the history of computing...its been there in most challangeing tasks. Sorry, but I learned UNIX when I have learned C. Thanks to that now I can administrate other, very different systems on different platforms and I wont even talk about TCP/IP protocol stack.

[kinglonewolf104]

@darijo203 Proven language? Sure it's still around because has evolved many times. It was never meant to be a commercial language and the two guys that created it only did so because they needed it to create Unix/Linux (I can never remember which, and haven't really used either OS's).

.

&eB

[darijo203]

And one more thing...how can learning any high level language with some low level possibilites be nonesense?

I mean...people write drivers, operating systems in C...do you really think that they dont know computing? :)

You should repear your C.

[ascheepe]

better yet.. use both... lisp has always been a fascinating language for me and these days I do have a scheme compiler installed for some toy programs. It's assembly/c which gave me the understanding of the underlying hardware while lisp/fortran frees me from that.

[nexicidious]

Bravo, if this vid doesn't win some best acting Oscars there will be rioting in the streets.