Article View: alt.folklore.computers
Article #932Re: PDP-11 chronology (was: Re: notable computer stories...)
From: m... Mark Brader
Date: Sat, 20 Jan 1990 13:01
Date: Sat, 20 Jan 1990 13:01
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> > 1) Way back when, when Doonesbury was just getting started, Trudeau > > had a little series with Mark learning how to program a PDP 11/70 > > (at least I think it was the 11/70) for a summer job. He didn't > > have such a good time with it. If anyone has the book "Still a Few > > Bugs in the System" they can confirm this for us all... > The PDP 11/70 didn't hit the streets until 1975. The >> article is quite right, except that it wasn't (called) programming, it wasn't an 11/70, and it wasn't "Still a Few Bugs in the System". The series (one week's worth of Doonesbury, I think) actually appears at the start of the book "Call Me When You Find America". My copy is part of a boxed set which also includes "Still a Few...", which may account for the error. The copyright dates shown are 1971-73, by the way. The computer is actually a "PDP-112". Little did Trudeau know that DEC would give up on the PDP name scheme before the numbers got that high! Finally, Mark's job title is actually "computer operator"... though he does produce a program (only to press the wrong button and delete it), so this presumably only shows that Trudeau didn't know the difference. -- Mark Brader "So the American government went to IBM SoftQuad Inc., Toronto to come up with a data encryption standard utzoo!sq!msb, m...@sq.com and they came up with...?" "EBCDIC!" This article is in the public domain.
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mbox-mo1.pugleaf.net!gmdzi!unido!mcsun!sunic!uupsi!rpi!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!sq!msbReferences:
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Path: mbox-mo1.pugleaf.net!gmdzi!unido!mcsun!sunic!uupsi!rpi!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!sq!msb From: m...@sq.sq.com (Mark Brader) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: PDP-11 chronology (was: Re: notable computer stories...) Summary: correct Doonesbury reference Message-ID: <1990Jan20.130157.10391@sq.sq.com> Date: 20 Jan 90 13:01:57 GMT References: <1361@scorn.sco.COM> <1523@redsox.bsw.com> Reply-To: m...@sq.com (Mark Brader) Organization: SoftQuad Inc. Lines: 29 Posted: Sat Jan 20 14:01:57 1990 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit