> PC's for everyone !
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-8
>
> Anyone with $20K, that is, in 1965 dollars...  :)
>
> A bit of perspective on the meaning of RISC, and perhaps also
>
> the meaning of money - Roughly $200 K in today's greenbacks...

The first college class I ever taught was assembly language programming on
the PDP-8. I still have the book from Digital. It was all Teletype and
paper tape. Use toggle switches to put a simple loader in core. Read in
another loader from paper tape. Load in an editor from paper tape. Write
your program. Punch the source code to paper tape. Load the assembler from
paper tape to core. Run the assembler, passing the source tape through
twice. Punch the executable object tape. Load the object tape into core.
Debug with toggle switches and front panel lights.

One of the instructions I remember is CIA for Complement and Increment
Accumulator (negate the accumulator).

Another interesting thing was that subroutine code started one word after
the stat address of the routine. A subroutine call put the return address
in the first location of the routine, then started executing in the next.
A return was an indirect jump back to the start of the subroutine where
the return address was stored, then back to the caller. A stack is sure
nice!

I really thought the architecture and instruction set of the PDP-11 was
clever.

Harold




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