Oct 17, 2024, 9:30 AMIn August 1981 we had a persistent problem with the RP06 on our PDP-11/70 crashing disks. It even crashed once while the DEC repairman was standing next to it trying to figure out why the previous pack had died. We collected a few dead packs, and they were forming a pile. Lillian, never one to miss an opportunity, suggested building a mobile. ...
Oct 17, 2024, 9:31 AMOr maybe we did it ourselves and Lillian added to it. I remember a foot-across ball of 9-track tape she supplied, but I can't find the photo I thought I had. There's a DECtape hanging here though.
Lab alumni might recognize the top element as the legendary copper-tellurium bar. Everyone should recognize young Dennis Ritchie at the left, leaning on a Tektronix 4014. ...
Oct 17, 2024, 9:31 AMA great day in Unix Room lore, if you ignore the fact we couldn't work at all.
Oct 17, 2024, 9:37 PMNote that this was a negative, a piece of silver gelatin film, left in a box for 43 years, and still serving its purpose. I believe nothing significant from that era survived my personal archive in digital form except for a few lucky pieces of software that flew the coop despite the best efforts of lawyers.
Oct 17, 2024, 9:31 AMLillian Schwartz's passing - she was a dear friend of mine, and among many other things of greater importance she made the Blit movie into something special - reminded me of this moment, but I couldn't find the evidence I was looking for except for a badly processed strip of 16mm film, film that sat in a little so-called spy camera (not a Minox) in my desk for years before this momentous occasion. But hey, we have this.
Oct 17, 2024, 9:32 AMMy film scanner has no holder for 16mm film, so these were made using a digital microscope. Given the appalling quality of the negative, it was more than up to the task.
@robpike if you got time to lean you got time to clean, Ritchie
Oct 17, 2024, 9:52 AM@robpike An amateur project in the price range of a high street art gallery.
Oct 17, 2024, 10:01 AM@robpike I miss such a work environment where I never worked #TootParadox
@robpike ...wait, is this the genesis of the name Plan 9...? ;-)
@robpike I like the suspended cake containers. They add a certain je ne sais quoi to this room.
Oct 17, 2024, 9:34 PM@waterbear I would think you are joking but just in case those are RP06 disc packs.
@robpike haha yeah, I wasn't sure exactly what they were, but I was fairly certain they weren't for cakes :)
@robpike Why I like working in open source is I'm allowed to take my toolbox from job to job. It must be really annoying knowing what you lost from that time.
@robpike Not even the punched paper tapes? I still have one (although missing pieces that I gave as gifts to students)
@robpike cloud storage, early prototype
@robpike Man, I was in university working on a PDP-11 at the same time. I loved that machine even though a lot of the design decisions would seem weird today, like keeping the registers in memory (which was great at the time).
It was funky - wiggle the light pen interface and it would reliably crash every time - but it still changed my life.
Oct 17, 2024, 11:10 AMSome earlier DEC machines (PDP10, probably PDP6) had the registers at memory locations 1 to 16. This meant you could load the tight loop of your program into the registers and execute there.