Some interesting feedback on the pidp-1

[Bill E]

When I was at the Computer History Museum last Dec watching the last running PDP-1 and Type 30 running spacewar, I spent a lot of time chatting with the staff. Most of them were not at all impressed with the pidp-1. Peter Samson's comment, "I have a real PDP-1". Heh. Well, the rest of us don't. Anyway, I was at my MIT reunion the last few days, ran into one special person from CHM, Mike Cheponis, someone we owe a lot of kudos. He's the one that got the PDP-1 restoration done. I talked to him about the issues. A big one was the one that's bothered me, p7sim is not even close to the actual Type 30. Truthfully, my new t30dpy falls a bit short in one area... the simulation of beam spread. Mike wanted just a single pixel, period, no poor imitation of a crt dot. Soooo, Mike C mode has been added to t30dpy. It renders a dot as a single pixel, period. Mike, you wanted it, I'll check it in tomorrow. It is kind of fun. Run spacewar with t30dpy with mikecmode enabled and see what the spaceships actually are supposed to look like.

The other major issue is the hardware panel driver, the lights don't look correct in terms of intensity or duration. I have a test program CHM uses that demonstrates the issues, so clearly my next task has to be a new panel driver. Sigh.

Bill

PS - I talked to a few people that did all the cool stuff way back on the PDP-1 and PDP-6, including people that were involved with the PDP-1X and the PDP-1D BBN timesharing system. I'm thinking it would be fun to try to get the BBN timesharing going if all the sources can be found. I've already implemented all the 'hardware' needed. The PDP-1X would be even more fun, but a lot of code and descriptions of the hardware is apparently missing for that one.