21 Feb
2020
21 Feb
'20
2:39 a.m.
On Thu, 20 Feb 2020, George Ross wrote:
We used to regularly restart machines which had been
turned off for a
while, and they would happily pick up where they left off. One PDP-8
was happy to resume after several years of idleness.
There was a story posted to Usenet yonks ago about a minicomputer (PDP-8?)
being used for nuclear testing. The last test involved the box inside a
truck, parked on top of the hole. Truck flies up into the air, but the
core memory survived intact, was retrieved, and plugged into another box
and all the data read out. Try doing *that* with solid-state memory :-)
-- Dave