11 Dec
2013
11 Dec
'13
8:26 a.m.
There's a museum in Mountain View and one here in Seattle that both have VAXen and
PDP-11's running. Here, we have a PDP-11/70 running. I got to show it to my
daughter.... :)
aps
Begin forwarded message:
From: Nick Downing <downing.nick(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Graphic Systems C/A/T phototypesetter
Date: December 10, 2013 4:03:54 PM PST
To: Larry McVoy <lm(a)bitmover.com>
Cc: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org, Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu>
Yes, well my first Unix experience was a 2.x.x kernel based Linux system
and I ate it up... although I missed out on the "glory days" I almost
feel like I was there, having learnt everything I possibly can about the
history of Unix, run V7, used simh extensively, ported stuff to/from
2.11BSD, got into the guts of the BSD networking stack, etc, etc...
I have read many DEC hardware manuals and I have been trying to buy a
PDP11 (not micro PDP), ideally it would be an 11/70, although
unfortunately I have just downsized to 2 rooms and advertised the other
2 rooms in my house for rent, so I may have to put that off for a bit :)
I narrowly missed out on a VAX11 in good condition a few years back, my
interest is more in PDP area but VAX is also acceptable.
It's a shame I'm in Australia as nearly all PDP hardware around here
seems to have been scrapped, and also I will probably never get the
chance to buy that beer for the Bell Labs/Berkeley engineers. But if
I'm in Germany I definitely plan to visit Bernd Ulmann's museum, see
http://www.vaxman.de/museum/museum.html and relive those glory days :)
cheers, Nick
On Tue, 2013-12-10 at 07:37 -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 09:45:22AM -0500, Doug
McIlroy wrote:
I'm extremely jealous of you. I'm a long time troff fan and would have
loved to have been there during that time. I'm sure it was far less
pleasant than my rose colored glasses have it, but it sure seems like
it was fun. I'd like to have met Joe Ossanna - care to share any stories
about what sort of person, programmer, etc he was?
That's perhaps a whole different thread, I'd love to shove a beer into
each and every bell labs guy hanging around here and get them talking.
Bell Labs was a huge influence on me, be good to have Bell-labs-stories.com
or something filled with your memories.
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The wikipedia description
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAT_(phototypesetter)>
seems pretty accurate although I have never seen the beast myself.
I can confirm the wikipedia description. At Bell Labs, however, we
did not use paper tape input. As soon as the machine arrived, Joe
Ossanna bypassed the tape reader so the C/A/T could be driven
directly from the PDP-11. The manufacturer was astonished.
The only operational difficulty we had was with the separate
developer. If you didn't hand feed the end of the paper perfectly
straight into that machine, the paper would tear. Joe Condon
fixed that by arranging for the canister to sit on rollers so
it could give when the paper pulled sideways.
The first technical paper that came off the C/A/T drew a query
from the journal editor, who'd never seen a phototypeset
manuscript before: had it been published elsewhere?
Doug