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Artifacts

[Today’s run:  7 miles]

Every once in awhile I’ll be in an on-line group,  usually an email list, and a computer nostalgia can-you-top-this war will break out.

My problem is that I came to computers at the end of the punch card era, after toggle switches and bubble memory were already gone.  There just wasn’t that much happening.

Any email list I am likely to be in probably already has some baby-boomer retired guy who used to wire up memory cores or fix coffee for Grace Hopper.  Either that or everyone has moved on to iSomethings and 4G phones and consider pre-internet computing as on a level with  PICs and Arduinos.  They may have a point.

I found this artifact of my college education the other day.  It is an instruction card for the PDP-11 family of computers.  I came in toward the end of the PDP-11 days, but I had one class, a summer class, in PDP-11 assembly language programming.  I still have the book too.

If you really want to read this, I recommend that you do a google search for PDP-11 Programming Card . More than one has been scanned, much prettier than this one.