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Nice! Love the "news segment" format your framed the story in.

Shame it's so long after you released this... but anyway. The two modes differed not only in instruction sets, the two modes even differed in one using 1's complement for negative numbers and the other 2's complement! Addressing was different too. One reason for having the PDP-8 mode on the Linc-8, the PDP-12's predecessor, was to eliminate the need for all the hardware otherwise required for the Linc instructions, by having an 8-mode program, called "ProgOfOp" carry out some of them - I *think* that included multiply and (half) character display. The Linc side would halt and run the calculation in the 8 side, saving a lot of flip-chips! We had two Linc-8s and a PDP-12. As I recall, Glasgow (University? Hospital?) wrote software to analyse ECG waveforms (or EKG on the left of the Atlantic).

Very cool, id love to get one someday

I feel like I'm taking a computer science class with Niles Crane.

Damn, I miss those blinking lights.Oscar Vermeulen (sp?) and team have done a beautiful job on their machines. Wonder if we'll see a pdp12 emulator as well?

Can we see what this giant was actually applied to do? I am always confused what these things were built to do other than for 40 years later someone trying to get them to turn on and boot an os....greaaaaat. but.....why?

Most torturous pizza and Minnesota more like it, it was located on the other side of my neighborhood gas station here in the metro so every time I filled up on gas, I got nostrils full of ‘Luce… Gas station is closed due to light rail but ‘Luce still wafts through the neighborhood when the wind blows the right direction.

It consumes about 1/2 hour before plant engineer shows up and tells you to shut it off because it’s generating way too much heat for Heller Hall to handle… ☹️ Those guys were such buzzkills…

Heh! Using testers are cheating! You can only check with Radio Shack(tm) Multimeters like we did! 😉 The 11/45 had handy ROM’s: Diode in is a one, diode out is a zero. Just read the columns and rows and presto, machine instructions of the boot ROM! 12 wasn’t like that of course.

RK05 platter in the background? Did those come with the 12 or were they laying around UMD? The 11/45 that CpE got in the mid 80’s came with a ton of RK05 packs but I lost track once CpE reclaimed the room for other projects.

Oh, it isn’t 80’s era UMD CS club PDP-12 Seymour. 😢. I guess poor one out for poor Seymour who did bite the dust back in the day. I wonder if CpE parted it out or if the same blood thirsty industrial engineers that tore the 11/45 to shreds savage the 12 as well; barbarians!

Oh ya: GO BULLDOGS!!! Class of ‘90

Is that the LINC12/PDP8 from the UofM Duluth math department?! Professor Anderson initially sponsored it I think. CpE got the PDP 11/45 from Rosemount, “Rosie”, I spent most of my time with although that was scrapped by the Industrial engineers in ‘87ish although I just managed to save the 11/45’s front panel with a few minutes to spare; it awaits a few more LED’s to be restored to full blinken-light glory! I helped assemble that unit back in the 80’s when it first arrived at UMD Heller Hall CS club room; shared space with the initial Mac’s we got from Apple that fall. I thought that met it’s untimely demise back in ‘88 or so. Good to see someone is also getting good use out of it; Linc tape drives were a bit fussy on it as I remember, we usually had to use paper tape on the attached tele-tank.

Glorious! Shows up how incredibly smart you needed to be back when, to create actual useful software.

My first job, starting in 1971, was at a medical research unit in Leeds England; I programmed, used, and when necessary maintained two Linc-8s and a PDP12. They had two completely different instruction sets - in fact two different architectures, one corresponding to the PDP8 and the other derived from the LINC (Laboratory INstrument Computer). We collected medical data (nerve "action potentials", blood pressure, kidney output etc.) in real time and displayed it on a TV monitor. Our machine had 4k*12 bits of core store (the basic configuration) but we were debating getting another 4k, and an 8" disk drive, when I left. I designed electronics for a trolley so we could work in different rooms and connect via cables in the ceilings. Although I programmed mostly in assembler, thanks to the Professor of Physiology I had a copy of a remarkable Fortran compiler which swapped code in and out to tape, enabling it to be a far more complete implementation of the language than you would think possible.

Shout out to David @UsagiElectric getting world creds.

Thank you for sharing! What a great video! I'll include a link in my Linux+ slides, when we're discussing character sets etc, as an illustration of where we came from and how easy we now have it with "just use ASCII or UTF". 🤓

The string-art nature of wire-wrapped backplanes both impresses and terrifies me, LOL. Well done!

I always thought TV shows and movies added sounds to computers just for effect. Apparently it was based on actual vintage computers! Love the PDP's

for context they are facing the CPU in todays computer which is smaller than your thumb

Hate OCTAL. Yuck We have a PDP9(working) PDP11 (working) PDP11 (working playing space invaders) in our hands on museum

Octal=weird

Andromeda Strain (movie) - Congressional hearing into how a sliver of paper between the hammer and the bell of the teletype almost ended the world...

Interesting to see the "Run" light turn on when you are at the highest speed. Effectively the Run brightness shows you the running vs idle ratio of Auto mode. If it is bright, then you are running at close to full speed of the computer. Most of the time Run is dark because slow stepping is such a small proportion of full speed.

This is brilliant, manyanks!

That's a nice-looking -12! The ones I had in the past, trying to start a computer school in the 80s, hadn't been treated that well.

Google: Young man, what else can you do, besides programming in C#, Java, Typescript, blah-blah, this-that-the other thing? Candidate: Well, i can program a PDP-12. Google: You are hired.

No ASCII or similar predefined fonts, but it means you have control over a full monochrome bitmap which is incredible for a machine initially released in 1969. Creating full bitmap moving objects would be possible and therefore games, so I checked and I see you've already featured Space Wars on this machine about 5 years ago, incredible.

4rawDJerezAKactK0zaPolRotToristz!

Try running "hellorld" on the IBM System/9000 (HAL) computer and see if that improves its personality any.

There’s somewhere in the world, about 50 men in a kitchen right about now, like that scene from fight club where meatloaf is on the table , chanting in unison “ her name was Amy P Vandling, her name was Amy P Vandling “ 😂

Many years back I worked with a PDP-12. There was a way to do the character display from within the 8 mode. It involved some I/O AKA (Slow NOP) instructions that drive the X, Y and Z of the "scope" that is the display. Sadly I don't remember the details. I found the section on the VR12 in what I have but it doesn't say what I/O numbers it is. Basically there are two 9 bit DACs for the X,Y and As I recall, you needed to TAD the X into the accumulator and then do a 6??? instruction, then you do the same for the Y and then a 3rd 6??? to light that spot on the CRT. There was a "space battle" game for the PDP-12 that was kind of fun. Two space craft orbited a planet and could rotate, fire their rocket and shoot.

I think I might still have one of those tapes. I also might have PDP-8 schematics or maybe they are for a 12. Many years ago I wrote some stuff that ran on a 12 running in its PDP-8 mode. It was a surprisingly easy machine to program.

No PDP-12 computer has ever made a mistake, or distorted Hellord! These things have happened before, and they have always been attributed to emulator error.

great investigative debug! thanks for reporting! 👾

I am so happy hellorld is a thing.

So, now where can we find Nick Moffitt's TH-cam channel, so I can listen to his dramatic announcer voice for another hour or so...

So creatively done and well produced, congratulations and cheers to all who were involved! Not to mention the most amazing PDP console I've ever seen in action...

We are LOVING this machine and celebrating it over on our Forgotten Machines server... And you even feature Usagi! Another friend of our server and machines...so well done, thank you!!!

That is so cool, what a time it was for a developer

Awesome! Thank you to everyone involved.

super cool! thanks for the video, love the old PDP's

His parents were so poor they could only afford one name.

Wow. Didn't even know there had been a PDP-12. Played with programming an 11 but there were only VAXes by the end of the 70s.

Nice! The old-timey, serious news voice was fun, too, hehe.

That was a great collaborative effort and fun to watch :D Many thanks to all involved!

That flat screen looks so cool. If only computers were smarter and cs language was easier to code.

:)

So glad to see the 1970-1980s Warrex-Centurion computer from Richardson, TX. has touched so many engineers around the world. As one of the old Centurion employees & other people from around the world helping David, I enjoyed this video.

10:47 i love how it makes a sound when something is on the screen is it the screen or something else making the sound ?