“Computer Unit” – A PDP-11/34 at my school (1979)

“Computer Unit” – A PDP-11/34 at my school (1979)(qmacro.org)

36 points by qmacro 5 years ago | 7 comments

ggm 5 years ago |

Systime was a DEC value added reseller which started with vt52 and vt100 terminals and wound up making vax clones. Famously, they got caught copying circuit boards and avoiding some ipr payments, and tried to bust ITAR export rules to the ussr. naughty!

The BBC nuke drama "edge of darkness" features the systime hq in Leeds.

I worked there briefly in 1982. Fantastic subsidised lunches in the factory canteen, robot delivery carts following magnetic stripes in the flooring, and a lisa workstation in the r&d department i played with.

The head of r&d John Bondi was Herman Bondi's son. (Herman was an Austrian-British mathematician and cosmologist of some note)

Happy days.

qmacro 5 years ago | |

(Author of post here) - thank you for these insights and history!

C1sc0cat 5 years ago | | |

Yes very interesting back in the mid 70's we had access to a PDP at my comprehensive School in Bedfordshire.

Though we didn't have the luxury of a terminal in the school - we sent our work of on coding sheets and got the results back for the next lesson.

We used CECIL (an assembly language designed for education) and in the second year BASIC.

This was the CSE stream BTW aka the stream for those expected to leave school at 16

core-questions 5 years ago |

Love the aesthetic on those machines, very cool.

davidgould 5 years ago | |

Late 70s DEC equipment visual designs were great.

mikro2nd 5 years ago |

Love how everybody in the picture was pair-programming!

qmacro 5 years ago | |

Now you point that out, yes - it's true. I remember working through various BASIC PLUS programs that we were creating, a few lines at a time, and, yes, together. On the Superterm terminal there was an exciting element of danger as you might get your finger swiped by the print head as you pointed to a piece of code that needed refactoring :-)