On 01 Mar 2022, Mike Powell said the following...
Too bad it is not COBOL or I might understand what it was doing. :)
Did they have COBOL for the PDP machines?
Going to move this to Classic Computers before we start something here we don't intend to! :D
They did have COBOL for the PDPs, but the PDP-8 and PDP-11 were quite
different from one another. The PDP-8 was fairly primitive as computers go.
It didn't have a consolidated CPU, the memory consisted of iron rings woven together with wire, and it had no concept of a stack. It had only 8 instructions, with one instruction including all operands per 12-bit word
(with one exception). The exception was a microcoded instruction that could represent (and execute) multiple operations simultaneously.
DEC's goal with the PDP-8 was to make an affordable computer (<$20K) for
people and businesses who may not have needed a full-blown IBM mainframe. Although it's dwarfed by even the most modest of modern computers, it was
quite popular at the time. There was even a cheaper, slower model, the
PDP-8/S that had a serial system bus: it did everything one byte at a time.
The PDP-10 (a successor to the PDP-6) and PDP-11 were more advanced.
I can compile a DOS or Linux version if you'd like (although I'll bet that there are already Linux binaries out there somewhere).
Jeff.
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