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Fun with OS/8

Crawford

Experienced Member
Joined
Oct 21, 2008
Messages
275
Location
Maryland
Folks,

I've gotten my SBC6120 (DEC PDP/8e clone) up to booting OS/8.

It's fun learning a new old OS, and seeing where later OS's came from.

I inadvertantly learnt how to shut off the nifty command interpreter (CCL) that allows shortened commands. Non-intuitively, typing 'CCL<enter>' turns it off. Finally got it back with 'R CCL<enter>'. Whew!

I've been wondering how you 'gracefully shutdown' a PDP-8. Anyone know if you can/should do this?

Thanks,
Crawford
 
Turn the power off I guess :) Actually I don't know, I guess I should learn so I can treat my real PDP-8/e nice once it is restored.

Anyways, I guess this means that you at least got your parts for the kit? Could you perhaps treat us with a picture or two?
 
Graceful powerdown

Graceful powerdown

I'm not sure that this does any good, but it seemed like a good thing to do: I always halt the processor before shutting the 8/e off. (Then I put 7605 in the SR so that restarting OS/8 will be quick next time I use the machine.)

I halt the processor first on the pdp11s also.

Lou
 
How to halt?

How to halt?

Lou,

(Sorry for the ignorance). How do you halt the processor? Is there a short assembly language program to do this?

(IIRC there was an undocumented 6502 instruction that put it into a one-instruction infinite loop, that was informally called HCF i.e. Halt and Catch Fire.)

-Crawford
 
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