On Aug 28, 2008, at 4:07 AM, rwg@sdf.lonestar.org wrote:
rwg>Does anyone besides Salamin remember the meaning of the agm error in Peter Samson's (1960s) PDP-1 music compiler?
TK> That argument greedily masticates.
Would you believe Samson himself had forgotten this? Seemed incredulous, even. It suggests that they don't have that compiler at the restoration project.
To clarify.... The music compiler we are running at the PDP-1 restoration project was assembled by me from source code in my possession dated 5/21/63. It does not contain the agm error; in fact it contains neither the string ag nor the string gm. Perhaps that error was added later by someone else.
Regards, --prs.
Wow, thanks for that, mystifying though it is. What about wlk and dnt wlk ? I don't suppose there was a compiler doc in that binder I donated. This all recalls another seemingly counterfactual memory of that era: There was on the front panel an indicator lamp labeled HALT STORE, right up there with RUN, CYCLE, and DEFER. No one had ever seen it so much as glimmer until a very short tape appeared on the console labeled Turn on HALT STORE, which did just that, while extinguishing RUN. But at the rollout, I could find no one else who shared this memory, not even Kotok (R.I.P.). So I ran down to examine the machine, and to my horror, there was no HALT STORE! Finally, Jack Holloway remembered that the very earliest PDP-1s (was RLE's Serial # 3?) had different sequence break logic, and used that bit to remember interrupting out of the IO wait state. I'll be dzmed. --rwg