DEMOCODING FOR THE PDP-1

[MICHAEL GARDI]

I know you all are super busy. I'm just trying to get an idea when this book will be available. I've been working my way through PROGRAMMING THE DEC PDP-1 - A QUICK WAY TO GET STARTED so I have plenty of great material to get me started. 

I was in my 20's in the late 70s and early 80s so I am quite familiar with trying to get a lot of performance out of limited hardware. I actually quite like coding in Assembler so I am looking forward to the PDP-1 challenge.  It occurs to me that I will again be able to make good use of my Graphics Gems and other graphics programming books.

Mike

[Oscar Vermeulen]

The book (it'll probably be in the form of more web pages, like the Assemby/Music/Lisp pages) WILL happen. But - writer's block. That is also because really, Norbert's ICSS blog posts are just about perfect to do a gentle introduction to assembly graphics programming. No point in trying to do that better. The section 'Learning by Doing' that I started basically proved to me that just needed to give pointers to the ICCS introductory blog posts (here, must-read material!)

So if we do this book, how to avoid copy-pasting what Norbert already wrote, but instead add useful new content. Writer's block! But temporary. I guess sections on basic assembly routines (for-next loops, routines for using the Typewriter, Type 30). That is the direction this should take to be useful.

It also would be fun to open a pinned thread in this Google Group - post your little assembly helper routines, for others to enjoy. Maybe that is not a bad idea - but it might be that we're too early in the PiDP-1's life for that. Not enough active users yet.

Kind regards,

Oscar.

[Angelo Papenhoff/aap]

Damn, sorry. Sometimes it's easier to announce something than to actually do it. I'm constantly falling down rabbit holes and procrastinating (two weeks go by quickly if you're busy looking at undocumented nigerian languages and also having fun discovering cartan-style differential geometry...). And for the longest time i was blocked from working on my projects because i had to get my own assembler in shape to continue. For the future I'm actually hoping that Norbert wants to take over the programming tutorial. I still want to write about my forth+lisp project, it's just too lovely to not tell the world about it :) But procrastinating is a very important job i take very seriously!

[Oscar Vermeulen]

That is a rather big ask to Norbert :-)

For the moment, I added a reference to his ICSS blogs for an intro in PDP-1 coding. Because from ICSS blog post 2 onwards, a 'gentle introduction' is exactly what he wrote there. At least it introduced me to PDP-1 graphics programming, and it felt gently:

https://www.masswerk.at/rc2016/10/02.html

In fact, that is pretty the much the introduction we though about. Maybe we should consider adding 'chapters' that should be read after his ICSS development blog. No need duplicating the gentle introduction that's already there!

Rethinking...