Dave - On Wed, Nov 01, 2006 at 09:12:49PM -0500, Dave McGuire wrote: > It all depends on what you're into. I've been discussing a > project with a friend that would involve building what amounts to a > copy of the PDP-8 ("Straight-8", no suffix) with individual > transistors. It's fun, cool, and highly educational in a number of > areas.
I once personally diagnosed and replaced a blown diode in a PDP-5. When it blew, it made an accumulator bit stick on, and the machine became unusable. That event caused the machine to be retired from the Caltech Cyclotron. My friends and I found it abandoned many years later, in about 1978. We fixed, refurbished, and played with it. The process was very educational. The PDP-5 was the predecessor to the PDP-8. The big difference between the two was cycle time: 10us for the PDP-5 vs. 4us for the PDP-8, IIRC. Each had 4K x 12 of core memory. It's possible that machine is still kicking around Caltech; if you're interested I could make inquiries. - Larry _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user