Great to hear these oral histories; they bring back memories. I was at Essex University a bit before Ken Salmon, but in the Dept. of Electrical Engineering Science. We had a PDP9 with two DECtapes, an ASR33 and a paper tape reader/punch. There was a massive stack of roughly A0-sized circuit diagrams for the PDP9, and whenever it went wrong a field service engineer would come in and fix it with a oscilloscope and knowledge. The PDP10 they had in the Computing Department served the whole university and ran a timesharing operating system (TOPS-10?). I wonder if Ken remembers Brian O'Mahoney who was the university tech wizard who supported the PDP10 operating system and made some interesting modifications to it. He let me have listings of the operating system in assembler and I used to read them in bed at night. Later I was R&D director of Arbat, a city software house, which was a DEC OEM. We put lots of PDP11s and VAXes into banks and oil companies.
Great to hear these oral histories; they bring back memories. I was at Essex University a bit before Ken Salmon, but in the Dept. of Electrical Engineering Science. We had a PDP9 with two DECtapes, an ASR33 and a paper tape reader/punch. There was a massive stack of roughly A0-sized circuit diagrams for the PDP9, and whenever it went wrong a field service engineer would come in and fix it with a oscilloscope and knowledge. The PDP10 they had in the Computing Department served the whole university and ran a timesharing operating system (TOPS-10?). I wonder if Ken remembers Brian O'Mahoney who was the university tech wizard who supported the PDP10 operating system and made some interesting modifications to it. He let me have listings of the operating system in assembler and I used to read them in bed at night.
Later I was R&D director of Arbat, a city software house, which was a DEC OEM. We put lots of PDP11s and VAXes into banks and oil companies.
Great to hear your DEC memories!