Re: hp - Agilent: "help us share your old manuals"

On 30 Dec 2005 17:34:35 -0800, Winfield Hill
<Winfield_member@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>John Larkin wrote...
>>
>> http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp9100.htm
>>
>> I have two classic HP9100 desktop calculators, truly astounding
>> technology for their time... CRT display, all transistor logic,
>> core memory, three different rom technologies, including multilayer
>> inductive-coupled pcb. Both are dead, and HP never released the
>> schematics, so I can't fix them. I've pestered several successive
>> HP archivists, who say
>>
>> Yes, we have the schematics
>> No, you can't see them.
>
> Maybe, when informed of the new Agilent policy, and rational,
> they'll let you come in and scan their manuals?!? :-)
>
>> I did my first control system simulations, for the 32,000 horsepower
>> LASH ship propulsion systems, on a 9100, later on a PDP-8 running
>> FOCAL.
>>
>> http://www.njscuba.net/artifacts/ship_freighter.html
>> http://www.harveystudio.com/lash.html
>
> Impressive stuff!
>
> Hey, then you should know of my buddy, Jim Van Zee, developer
> of the advanced DEC machine FOCAL interpreters in the 70's.

Rick Merrill wrote the original PDP-8 and later PDP-11 Focal
interpreters, based on the Jovial language or something. Rick, and the
structure of Focal-8, influenced the PDP-11 architecture and that had
a huge influence, like on the 68K for example. I wrote the random
number generator for Focal-11, all 20 bytes or so of it, using a
pseudorandom shift register, which replaced the classic, terrible
modulo thing that was there before.

I learned to program by reading the Focal-11 listing. It was amazing
code. It was a nice language, at least as handy as C, and you could
enter, edit, and run useful applications in 4K words of core on a
PDP-8 (12 bit word!) or an 11 (16 bits, beautiful machine.)

I don't know Jim; what did he do?

FOCAL is related to MUMPS somehow.

John

.

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