Subj : Re: Colossal Cave Adventu
To   : Mike Powell
From : Jeff Thiele
Date : Fri Mar 04 2022 04:40 pm

On 01 Mar 2022, Mike Powell said the following...
 MP> Too bad it is not COBOL or I might understand what it was doing.  :)
 MP> 
 MP> Did they have COBOL for the PDP machines?
 MP> 
 MP> Going to move this to Classic Computers before we start something here we
 MP> 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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