http://pdp11.aiju.de/
Amazing!
I was in high school when I got my first Unix account on a computer science system at the university. It might have been a PDP-11. I remember struggling to teach myself C from Kernighan and Ritchie when all I knew was Basic. And of course way too shy to actually ask anyone for help.
1 comments:
Some people have too much time on their hands.
Yes, the computer you used back then was a PDP-11/40 with 128 KB of RAM (64 KB code and 64 KB data), an rk05 disk pack for Unix (around 2.2 MB if I recall correctly) and another disk (not DEC, I don't remember the name) for all user files. The user disk was 6 MB, and we had another one of them to back up the user files. We were running Unix v6. After learning C without documentation, I remember what a revelation it was to read K&R and go, "Oh, that's why it does what it does."
Most of the grad students in Computational Science and a number of us geekier undergrads used that box. At busy times, "who" would show 10-15 people typing documents to be formatted by nroff or troff, or running adb to debug their C programs.
The scary part for me: I got into the emulator and started Unix. I did "ls", then tried to cd into a directory. "cd" didn't work. Somewhere from way back in my memory popped out the thought, "cd was just a shell define. The command was chdir". Sure enough. chdir works. How the hell did I remember that?
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