> These 1806VM2 are still being made by Angstrem, if you need to build a PDP-11 computer to run Tetris on, or repair a Buran shuttle you may have laying around.
wow!
wow!
The process memory was limited to 32kb (maybe 64kb... can't recall) and the OS's executable system supported seamless overlays. Basically as needed the OS would swap in different code segments (min 4k?). With careful planning you could build some pretty big applications... so long as you could get descent separation. You *could* swap overlays over and over and over... but this would kill any sort of performance... best to swap in a "AR" overlay, and when the user switches to "GL" swap that overlay in.
The machine language was also pretty nice. Several addressing modes were program counter relative which was amazing (eg. JMP to 1500 words from current PC) . When I first learned that that windows loads an executable and then goes through and fixes up memory addresses so JMP instructions (et al) would work I could hardly believe it. If only the x86's had decent support for a PC relative addressing mode :)
And the Digital Equipment Corp documentation! Glorious. A wall of shelves, 10 feet long, 7 feet tall, filled with 3 inch binders explaining everything in detail! Shivers!!
Microsoft's online documentation is the closest thing in quality to the old DEC stuff.
DEC documentation was something else though, agreed. My KD11-A came with everything you'd expect to be documented these, plus full schematics, plus microcode listing in source and flow chart form.
I still have shelves of DEC documentation (and a few PDP-11's).