PDP 8 Timesharing

COURYHOUSE at aol.com COURYHOUSE at aol.com
Mon Nov 30 13:31:14 CST 2015


somewhere i have an edu system book. 
HA!   yea the fixed head  drives made better swapping  media!  for  tss 8 
as  core was small in those  days!
 
 
 
In a message dated 11/30/2015 12:03:12 P.M. US Mountain Standard Tim,  
rickb at bensene.com writes:

Ed  wrote:

> when I was young in the computer biz   wanted to  build a  timeshare  8
> system..
> however ended  up  going down the HP  route instead  for the  rest  of
my
> career .
> There was also  something called TSS-8  as I remember. Ed#

I'd *LOVE* to be able to have a real-hardware HP  Timeshared BASIC system
running here, but alas, those are a lot harder to  come by than DEC
stuff.  I do have a 2000/Access system running under  SimH hooked
directly to an ASR-33, which emulates the experience relatively  closely,
but there's nothing like the real hardware.  I cut my teeth  learning
programming on the HP Timeshared BASIC systems starting in 6th  grade
under the 2000C version.

TSS-8 was indeed a timeshare system  for the PDP 8, but it was written to
run on DECs earlier fixed-head disk  drives that are hard to come about
today (compared to RK05's).    I've heard that someone had made changes
to TSS-8 to get it to run on an  RK05, but the fact that it's a moving
head disk drive versus a fixed head  drive that TSS-8 was designed to run
under, the poor RK05 gets thrashed  pretty hard when timesharing.

There are also the Edusystem timeshared  systems that DEC developed for
the PDP 8,  but I haven't looked too  deeply into these  yet.

-Rick




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