FOCAL
Julian Elischer
julian at freebsd.org
Sat Dec 3 08:44:27 UTC 2016
Some friends and I have a pdp8 here.. we replaed the bulbs with leds
about 25 years ago, but
last time we tried it, it still ran.. model number escapes me.. its
currently at a friend's place.
It was the controller for a DISTEC (?) display, the predecessor for
the wonderful gt40 and used as a frontend for teh pdp10 (KA10, serial # 6)
On 3/12/2016 12:07 PM, Larry Rosenman wrote:
> On 2016-12-02 22:02, Kevin Oberman wrote:
>> On Fri, Dec 2, 2016 at 5:59 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at freebsd.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On Saturday, 3 December 2016 at 11:40:36 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>>> > Be there an implementation of FOCAL? I have a hankering to get
>>> back to
>>> my
>>> > early programming days :-)
>>>
>>> Heh. I have a paper tape from my first year at uni somewhere in the
>>> mess on my desk. It's been there for at least 10 years, and it's
>>> short enough for it to be practical to read it in by eye, but I
>>> haven't got more than a third of the way through. It's in FOCAL-69,
>>> and does some world-shattering calculations like mean and standard
>>> deviation. It would be fun to run it again--once.
>>>
>>> Greg
>>>
>>
>> Wow! Have not thought of FOCAL in years. Used to write a bit both
>> when in
>> college and, using FOCAL-11, in my early years at LLNL. Unlike
>> FOCAL on a
>> PDP-8, FOCAL-11 ran on top of DOS-11. (No relation to Microsoft
>> DOS.) The
>> PDP-8L was the only solid state computer in the lab. All of the others
>> still had vacuum tubes and drum memory, though the Univac Athena
>> had both
>> drum and core.
>>
>> In college I wrote a simple craps game and, it it caught you trying to
>> cheat, it zeroed your account and gave you the finger on the
>> ASR-33. My
>> computer logic prof (and department head) saw that trivial ASCII
>> art and
>> chewed me a new one for putting code to generate that gesture on a
>> school
>> computer. That was about 45 years ago. Memories!
>
> Brings back memories for me as well from high school. Back in 1972.
>
> PDP-8/L in the Levittown (NY) School District.
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