🚀 go-pugleaf

Russ writes:
=>Memories of running diagnostics on the '10 and turning off the
=>CPU room lights - better than Laserium and free to boot.

I worked for a small medical research company in the late '70's.
We were using PDP-8's for development, and as the heart of our
product.  Since we were a research organization, we were always
looking for handouts ... uh, *donations* ... to continue our work.
So, at least once a month, someone would come in to tour the plant.
At that time, the boss always asked me to "look busy", so we could
make a good impression.  Well, when the rube ... uh, *contributor*
... came in, I was always hard at work, coding or debugging, or just
running tests; and, invariably, the boss would yell at me later for
not "looking busy".  It seems it's really difficult to program and
actually *look* like you're doing something: people expect to see
things moving, and lights flashing.  Well, finally, I figured out
what to do.

First, some background, for those of you who haven't met a PDP-8
(the rest of you can skip to the next paragraph).  The PDP-8 was
a wonderful little machine with very little memory (we used all of
the memory which would fit -- I think it was only 16K).  It had a
front panel with 12 toggle switches through which you entered the
bootstrap loader *every morning*.  There were two rows of lights,
one which always displayed the program counter, and another which
could be switched (by a dial on the front panel) to show the acc-
umulator, the status of the ALU, or the general status bits (I for-
get what they were called).  We had an 8-platter hard drive, two
8-inch floppies, and a DECtape drive.  This is the important part:
all of the files on all of the peripherals were contiguous;  When
you deleted a file, it left a gap where the file was; in order to
regain that space you had to "squish" the device.  The common pro-
cedure for doing this was to squich to a separate device, otherwise
the program would spend all day, seeking and rewinding, seeking and
rewinding.  Beginning to see the idea that I had?

The day the suckers ... uh, *investors* ... came to visit, the mom-
ent I heard that they were in the building, I started a squish on
the DECtape.  Then I sat down and wrote my mother a letter (she
hadn't heard from me in a while).  When the investors came into the
computer room, they saw me hard at work:  lights were flashing, tapes
were spinning, and I was taking notes!  For added effect, as the boss
was pointing things out to them, I stopped writing, turned the dial
on the front panel -- looked pensive for a second -- and went back to
"taking notes".  Later, the boss told that he was immensely pleased
with the impression I made -- and asked how much work I had gotten
done!  This, to me, was the funniest part: even *he* thought I was
working!

				-Garison-