John W Kennedy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: +--------------- | I said "machine language" and I meant it. I haven't touched a 1401 since | 1966, and haven't dealt with a 1401 emulator since 1968, but I can | /still/ write a self-booting program. +---------------
Heh! I never dealt with a 1401 per se [except when running a 1410 in 1401 emulation mode to run the Autoplotter program, which wasn't available for the 1410], but I still remember the IBM 1410 bootstrap instructions you had to type in on the console to boot from magtape. v v L%B000012$N where the "v" accent is the "wordmark" indicator. That says to read in a whole tape record in "load" mode (meaning that wordmarks & groupmarks in memory are overwritten), synchronously (stop & wait), from tape drive 0, starting at memory location decimal 12, which, since the 1410 used *1*-based addressing, was the location just after the no-op at location 11 above. [Note that these are actual *machine* instructions, *not* "assember"!! Like the 1401, the 1410 was a *character* machine, not an 8-bit-byte binary machine. The bits in a character were named 1, 2, 4, 8, A, B, and W (wordmark). Oh, and C, but that was character parity -- the programmer couldn't set that separately.] What was the corresponding 1401 boot sequence? Oh, for the record, IMHO the DEC PDP-8 had a *much* simpler machine language and assembler than the IBM 1401/1410. ;-} -Rob ----- Rob Warnock <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 627 26th Avenue <URL:http://rpw3.org/> San Mateo, CA 94403 (650)572-2607 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list