PDP-8

I went to Oyster River High School in Durham New Hampshire. At the time, ORHS had a PDP-8/e. It was one of the first computers I got to program. I had tried to build a COSMAC Elf in eighth grade, but I suck at electronics and I was living in Spain. I never finished it in part because when I returned to the U.S. I had access to ORHS's PDP-8 and the University of New Hampshire's DEC-10.

The PDP-8 at the high school had core memory but no storage. It was connected to two ASR-33 terminals, which had integrated paper-tape punchdrs and readers. These terminals were 110 baud, i.e. amazingly slow, which made it inconvenient to run software other than BASIC, since the software was loaded via the slow paper-tape reader.

BASIC could support both terminals, but without an operating system, the other software ORHS had would only run on one terminal. I was allowed to stay after school and run the other software, but it took a lot of time, because I would have to load it from paper tape, do whatever I wanted with that software and then reload BASIC before leaving.

Luckily, I taught myself enough PDP-8 machine language and assembly that I was able to later get a job programming in PDP-8 assembler at a local company. So, although my high school was my introduction to the PDP-8, the "serious" (right!) PDP-8 work I did was on a machine that ran an actual operating system (Nope! Not OS/8, but ETOS, which required a special board). Just don't try to read cards while the DECtape is spinning.