Outside this group, how many people have you impressed?

[wjegr...@gmail.com]

I live in NH and there are a LOT of ex-DEC people and MIT EE/CS grads around. I posted on our town FB page a pic my 10, instant thumbs up. I proudly wear by PDP-10 sweatshirt and T-shirt and get constant comments, "Oh did you work at DEC? Did you use x, y z?". In the grocery store. Pretty fun. Then I show my pics of the 8 and the 11, and I'm the most popular guy around. My neighbor a half mile down the road has one of the early 10 kits up and running. Hmm, we should play networked maze. Small world.

[Steve Pitcher]

Last night, my wife asked why I'm going backwards..  ;-)  Not kidding.

Where in New Hampshire??  I'm from Litchfield... over 10 years ago.  In Florida now.  I'm in a retirement place... there's  one guy here who at least knew to assume the appropriate expression when I told him I was getting a PDP-10!!!  :-)  He's ex-DEC.  I think, field service... Parts.  When I received my package, I took it down to his apartment, and we opened it together.  He appeared quite interested.  Now that we've got Pi-Connect, I'll offer him an account!!  :-)

I don't expect there are any other PiDP kits within 10 miles of me.  Anyone in The Villages???

- stp

[oscarv]

On Sunday, May 12, 2024 at 8:49:06 PM UTC+2 stpit...@gmail.com wrote:

Last night, my wife asked why I'm going backwards..  ;-)  Not kidding.

Backwards? In what sense is using a PDP-10 going backwards? :-)

I don't expect there are any other PiDP kits within 10 miles of me.  Anyone in The Villages???

I actually used to be able to respond to that! But the setup I had fell into the memory sink.

As my introduction to RSX-11, I wrote a program to use Johnny Billquist's TCP/IP package. Called Tinder for Minicomputers, it was online for a few weeks actually, just for fun. On RSX-11, you could go into a web site on the PiDP-11, enter your postal code (worldwide) and it would offer to send an email to other PiDP-11 users within a 25 mile radius to ask 'would you like to exchange email addresses?'. 

Because, you see, most PiDPs only get to connect to humble microcomputers. And as they do not know they are a simulation (none of us know this about ourselves...) they feel lonely as proper minicomputers. They really do need to exchange packets with other minis :-).

A thoroughly useless two weeks of programming, but it did teach me exactly how good RSX-11M+ is as an operating system, and how incredibly well integrated all the languages on it were. I used a mix of Fortran, Business Basic, and Datatrieve. It would work flawless even under a heavy load of 3 users concurrently!

... this would be a nice ITS programming project, but my mental capabilities have eroded a bit by now...

Kind regards,

Oscar.

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Will they be impressed if you show them it can do this?

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Carlos Sancho wrote:
> Is it missing a ‘WO’?

It's intentional.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ6mwbTGXGQ

[Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein]

Nice!!!

Now, here is another challenge then: make the PiDP-10 *scan* QR-codes :-)

The PDP-10 has computer vision in its genes, so I think it's not a weird thing to do. For image acquisition, I'm thinking ESP32Cam , connected to the PiDP-10 via a serial line.

Would be a fun thing to use for demos as well, I guess...to impress people outside this group.

Thoughts?

HB

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Now, here is another challenge then: make the PiDP-10 *scan* QR-codes :-)

The thought has occurred to me, and maybe that would be a job for Maclisp.

 

The PDP-10 has computer vision in its genes, so I think it's not a weird thing to do. For image acquisition, I'm thinking ESP32Cam , connected to the PiDP-10 via a serial line.

Sure!  The AI lab PDP-10 had a camera device called the vidissector.  You tell it an X-Y coordinate, and then you can read the image intensity there.  It was used together with a robot arm for stacking blocks.  Unfortunately I haven't found that code.

[Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein]

Oh nice. This computer vision thing is another deep rabbit hole to get into :-)

I found this which describes FAKETV [sic! not something that is easy to google...], a software meant to allow developers to work transparently with stored images instead of having to use the camera live.

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/41061

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/41939

That would be handy to have of course...

The whole "Vision Flash" series of documents looks interesting. To me it looks like most of that software used to live in the dsk:vis directory which is now almost empty.

Maybe future archaeology can unearth more stuff.

Cheers

HB

[Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein]

So my ESP-32 Cam camera board has arrived, and *somehow* interfacing this with the PiDP-10 under ITS will be my on-and-off-sidekick-project for the next couple of months, whenever I feel like it.

If you think about this, it is quite shocking: 

-the camera of course outperform the "Vidisector" thingy from back then in terms of resolution, pixel depth, one-shot-color capabilty,....you name it

-the ESP32 microcontroller attached to the camera has

   - clock rate  up to 160 MHz

   - Built-in 520 KB SRAM, external 4MPSRAM

   - supports WIFI ,

  .- Serial Port Baud-rate: Default 115200 bps

and all that for under 10 EUR ... compare that to a PDP-10 back then.....

But can it connect to a dozen terminals or teletypes? Can it heat a whole bunch of offices? No of course it can't! 

:-)

Cheers

HB