Learn to program a PDP-11 videos

Jason sez, "DePauw University presents a series of videos on how to program the PDP-11. They present all of the steps: toggling a loader, reading and punching paper tape and running an assembler. A must-see for retrocomputing neophytes! Just one Jon-Lovitz-warning: ACTING!"

ZOMG, these are utterly fantastic!

Using a PDP-11/10 to Teach Content and History in Computer Organization Courses (Thanks, Jason!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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js7a

PROM was invented in 1956, and EEPROM in ’71.
brucee10

#10 – ’04
LightningRose

It’s been over 20 years since I coded for a PDP-11, but I still remember the machine opcodes for a couple of the instructions.

The PDP-11/45 had a limit of 256K bytes of RAM. Later models could hold as much as 2M bytes.
paradoxotaur

#10 — ’05. :)
avtdeadhead

Ahhh… the PDP-11… Brings me back to the days of playing spacewars on the old PDP-9 at the Kewit center at Dartmouth when I was a kid. It sure was an awesome break from the Pong game at home. ;cD

I do have to admit that it’s amazing to have gone from a teletype in grade school to the PC with the 1.5 TB hard drive at home. It’s also nice not to need a room just to contain the computer, not to mention how much paper tape you would need to run M$ Office or Adobe CS4 these days.

It also makes me wonder where we’re going to be headed in the next 30 years.
Bloo

Or, in the spirit of the number representation system most used on the PDP at my community college, OCTING!.

I was taught to use octal representation (digits 0-7) on a PDP when writing representations of things like the value of a character (the US-ASCII ‘A’ = octal 100 for instance). Later, when I moved to IBM equipment, the more compact hexadecimal was used (where ‘A’ = hexadecimal 40 but more importantly you could count up to decimal 255 before you had to use hexadecimal 100).
Anonymous

We had a PDP11/70 at school in the early 80′s – they would let us log on and fool around. It ran an OS called RSTS. We also played loads of games – many of which we typed in by hand from a book called ‘Basic Computer Games’ by David Ahl.
apeine

Well, I haven’t had that much fun watching a “nerdy” video for a long time. They tend to be very technical, and no fun at all.
I wish they “had time” to show the internals of the computer and how would they run a star trek program…
Anonymous

What a flash..I programmed the PDP11 for Texas Instruments back in the late 60′s. It was used then to perform up to eight parametric tests on various transistor types. I still remember the boot sequence..
js7a

Bloo, ASCII ‘A’ is 0101. 0100 is ‘@’
Anonymous

I went to DePauw. Dave Berque is really like that.

Class of ’97.
paradoxotaur

Cory — I went to DePauw… and in my 4 years I did a few projects with Dave Berque… from the few minutes I’ve been able to watch… I can honestly tell you, this ‘acting’ isn’t too far off from the real thing… he’s fantastic. By far one of the best Profs at DPU.
brucee10

I’m another DePauw alum and CS major. We watched these in class and laughed the whole time.
Rotwang

Damn, don’t take me back there…I still remember the screech of head crashes at Brookhaven National Lab in the early 80s.
zuzu

Please send comments/suggestions/etc. to either Dave Berque (dberque@depauw.edu) or Doug Harms (dharms@depauw.edu).

How about licensing the content as Creative Commons and mirroring it on the Internet Archive?
Anonymous

Oh my god, I went to DePauw … my school is everywhere.

Hey Paradoxotaur and Brucee10, what years? :)

(I’m ’03…)
guy_jin

the acting in this is hilariously bad. Did these people even take Drama in High school?
Anonymous

Old school… unless of course you were working on a PDP-8 in which case this is bleedin’ edge state of the art
HomersBrain

I learnt BASIC on the Dec PDP-11/84 in the late 80s. They’d also installed a 4GL language which I never learned as they started bought an IBM AS/400.

The 4GL was called Vista.
Bloo

My error on the US-ASCII ‘A’ thing. I work in an EBCDIC world and I tried to (here it comes) fetch it from memory but I guess I was a bit off.
js7a

Front panel toggle switches have always been intensely cool-looking, and even somewhat useful for some very limited debugging tasks. But there really has never been any excuse for not providing a serial monitor in ROM, not since the early 1950s, and maybe the Altair where a ROM monitor may not have been commercially viable (iffy).
Kabur Naj

Who cares about the acting? The content is great! (And the music puts it over the top IMO.)

However, I think I need to call them on their anacronistic use of the phrase “In like Flynn.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that a reference to the 1982 film “Tron”? Surely the computer programmer from the mid-seventies depicted in this video would have no knowledge of that phrase. Where’s the realism?!?
doug117

#10
The PDP-11 had core memory (memory made of ferrite cores). 4k, maybe 16 or 32k.

ROM was a science fiction fantasy in the early 70s when I played with PDP-11.

I would toggle in the boot sequence from (my own) memory. Well it was only 16 words.

(The good ol’ days. Sigh.)
jawells

I suppose that’s what happens when CS professors try to act. Sometimes painful to watch, but the content was outstanding!

It makes me want to download at PDP-11 emulator like SIM-H and make it work!
Anonymous

This video made me cringe. What’s with the incessant “we don’t have enough time that” bull? Why doesn’t he just shut and listen to the guru? And that bloody Gen. Click[tm] wankeress with her “duuuh… where’s the Windoze?” totally ruins it. All the more surprising she actually seems to appreciate retrocomputing.

Man, I’d go back there any day and trade this windows-pc bullshit for a funky PDP… or a UNIVAC even.
LightningRose

#20, “In like Flynn” goes back to the 1940′s and refers to actor, Errol Flynn.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1127/does-in-like-flynn-refer-to-errol-flynns-success-with-women