Re: PDP-8

[Dave Engvall <dengvall-at-charter.net>]

Jon, 
You did miss something. Michael had commented that he has a couple of old
edm machines. At least one of which used a PDP-8 as a controller.
Quite different from emc, etc.

My Mazak V5 has a Fanuc 7M controller based on AMD's 2901 4 bit ALU.
Stacked 4 in a row. That probably makes it equivalent to a PDP-11 like the
11/23. With very carefully written assembly that can do quite a bit but
nothing like the processor required to to a good job on emc.

In the '80's I did a conversion of a PE-303 AA to digital...12 bit A/D
operating at 5 KHz or so off the photomulitplier amp. Signal averaged,
computed a 2nd order polynomial as a curve fit. All done in 4K (16 bit
words) of assembly by a very bright chemist I had working for me. All done
by hand assembling the code! Ran for 10 years of so without a failure.

Dave


On 3/13/03 10:26 AM, "Jon Elson" <elson-at-pico-systems.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> Dave Engvall wrote:
> 
>> Michael,
>> Not everything you need but a start.
>> 
>> 
>> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-8
>> 
>> Dave Engvall
>> 
>> 
>>  
>> 
> Did I misss something?  I used some PDP-8's and related machines a
> LONG time ago.  But, I can say with a GREAT DEAL of confidence
> that you'll never get EMC ported to run on one!
> 
> (In fact, my Pentium Classic can do the complete 3-axis servo calculation
> including I/O in the time a PDP-8 can execute about 4 or 5 machine
> instructions!)
> 
> Jon
> 
>