Digital, sigh.
Jhild said, " I remember playing a game we called Star Wars that was programmed on a PDP 1... It got me hooked on computers."
I think there's a whole generation of computer professionals who will always have fond memories of the PDP product line. It was the first reasonably priced computer (that is, it wasn't $100,000+), and so, for many of us, it was the first computer we were allowed to touch instead of just looking at it through a sheet of plate glass while some white-jacketed nerd put our cards in the hopper or mounted our tapes. You could flip the switches of the old PDP's console, and write machine language. At Wisconsin, Paul Pierce made a PDP 11/20 (the first miserable, slow model of that long-serving line) play music with a single output bit interfaced to a speaker, and that damn program was run for every dignitary that came through the Systems Lab for years afterwards.
Digital Equipment Corporation products brought the world the Unix operating system, the first text adventure games, and large pieces of what ended up called "the internet".
I am sad. And, to top it all off, COMS is down a bit for no particular reason.
Dick |
