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Retrocomputing

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  • @paxdiablo: Great find! I can feel the rust scales falling off really old brain cells. Ah, coding in the 1970s.... Commented Nov 14, 2018 at 2:20
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    Ira, weirdly enough, I've only just finished re-reading "The soul of a new machine" about the machines that immediately followed Nova. I wasn't cutting code in '69, I was only 4yo at that point, but I still like reading about the history. Commented Nov 14, 2018 at 2:35
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    @paxdiablo: Data General was a damn funny place. It spun out of DEC, the Nova being a DEC-internal competing design for their planned 16 bit computer product, for which the PDP-11 design won. The Nova was spectacularly successful because it was cheap, cheap because it was incredibly simple internally. Because of this it was easy to copy so was cloned several times, including by EDS itself. One of the clone makers, Keronix (I helped them design a clone!), had a plant burn down, and fingers were pointed at DG's president DiCastro but nothing was ever proven. Commented Nov 14, 2018 at 8:48
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    I went to High School in the mid 70's. They managed to upgrade to an Alpha Interactive Computing Environment (ALICE) system for the students while the administration went on about business using Unit Record Equipment. (It's hard to calculate payroll when your plugboard can't handle multiplication.) A favorite feature was that even with the console locked you could set the switches to 136310 octal (IIRC) and the O/S would halt the machine shortly thereafter. That effectively unlocked the console and you could "correct" your privileges before hitting Continue. BZUP anyone? Commented May 12, 2022 at 3:23
  • @HABO: Block Zero Utility Program BZUP ... yeah, we did what we had to do to make managing a finicky small computer possible. Not pretty, just possible :-} Commented May 12, 2022 at 14:13