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Re: What is an animal or an SSD drive? (Was: blah, blah, blah) Android editors

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Daniel70 <daniel47@eternal-september.org> wrote:
> On 11/02/2025 12:00 pm, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> > On Mon, 10 Feb 2025 08:47:39 +0100, Arno Welzel wrote:
> >> Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 2025-02-09 00:35:
> >> 
> >>> So you never used core memory.
> >> 
> >> Correct. But core memory is not intended as *persistent* memory,
> >> even when it can be used this way.
> > 
> > It was indeed regularly used that way. Consider that, on machines
> > from the core memory era, there was no ?boot ROM?. The first-stage
> > bootloader was typically around a dozen machine instructions or so,
> > which had to be hand- entered using front-panel switches.
> 
> I remember having to do that on a PDP-8 (was it??) in 1982-3.

  That seems rather late!
  
  I used similar machines ((16-bit instead of 12-bit) HP2116 and later)
and toggling the precursor to the BBL (Basic Binary Loader) in the late
60s, early 70s.

  In 1982, I was already using 32-bit (HP) Unix machines which had
firmware bootloaders and also the earlier/same_time 16-bit HP RTE (Real
Time Executive) machines had firmware bootloaders many years before
that.

> > (No doubt seasoned operators had this memorized.) It was handy that
> > this could be preserved across power cycles, assuming it didn?t get
> > overwritten by some wayward buggy program.
> > 
> > Then there were applications that ran without an OS as such. For
> > example, on the PDP-8, you could load a BASIC interpreter. This would
> > take about 20 minutes to load off paper tape. So the fact that a
> > power cycle did not wipe memory was helpful if you had a lot of BASIC
> > programs to run.

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Re: What is an animal or an SSD drive? (Was: blah, blah, blah) Android editors Daniel70 <daniel47@eternal-september.org> - 2025-05-14 21:34 +1000
  Re: What is an animal or an SSD drive? (Was: blah, blah, blah) Android editors Frank Slootweg <this@ddress.is.invalid> - 2025-05-14 12:54 +0000
    Re: What is an animal or an SSD drive? (Was: blah, blah, blah) Android editors Daniel70 <daniel47@eternal-september.org> - 2025-05-16 21:29 +1000
      Re: What is an animal or an SSD drive? (Was: blah, blah, blah) Android editors Frank Slootweg <this@ddress.is.invalid> - 2025-05-16 14:13 +0000
        Re: What is an animal or an SSD drive? (Was: blah, blah, blah) Android editors Daniel70 <daniel47@eternal-september.org> - 2025-05-17 21:00 +1000

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