Question about Dungeon game on the PDP 38
I don't know how true this is, but I heard a story of how the H-11 came about.
When KO started up DEC, they didn't have the bucks to buy all the test equipment they needed. So they bought and built a bunch of Heathkits. Ken had a soft spot for Heath ever since, and when the original LSI-11 was obsolete, instead of scrapping all the boards, the sold them to Heathkit to make H-11s.
I think what I'm saying is that I think it might be possible to teach -- debugging skills? problem-solving skills? something like that -- without getting into the domain knowledge of...
The machine was WAY ahead of any home built computer of its day. 16 bits instead of 8 bits, and FAST. My "benchmark" was a basic program to do my model rocket flight simulation. The TRS-80 couldn't do anything mroe than 4 function calculator math, much less inverse hyperbolic cotangents. The best I found was the Comodore PET, which took about 3.5 seconds to do the calculations I needed to do hundreds (thousands) of times. The H11 was so fast I had to put it in a loop to be able to time it with my stopwatch. IIRC it was around a tenth of a second. And the compiled Fortran was a couple orders of magnitude faster than the interpreted Basic I benchmarked with.
That would be similar to playing with a screwdriver to see how many ways you can use...
Could you imagine a company doing something like that today? Making last years hardware available to hobbyists REALLY cheap?
Bob Kaplow NAR # 18L TRA # "Impeach the TRA BoD" www.encompbutterve.org-~kaplowr www.nira-rocketry.org www.nar.org
People who exercise their embryonic freedom day after day, little by little, expand that freedom. People who do not will find that it withers until they are literally "being lived." They are acting out scripts written by parents, buttociates, and society. --Stephen R. Covey
One =5QPentium=AE_III_600MHz_Processor_= =5Qand_one_Celeron=AE_700MHz_processor=2C_which_= =5Qis
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