PDP-11's
Working for a newspaper, we got rid of our PDP-11's a couple of years ago. A company that I used to work for (Atex), made newspaper publishing systems out of PDP-11/780's.
The did a lot of custom hardware too, in the end there was a J11 turbo board with onboard sim memory (no more going over that 1Mhz bus to get to the memory boards, the speed difference was incredible.
We had a few compilers on there. There was a pascal one, but there was also a whitesmiths (??) C compiler that was insanely broken, if you nested more than 5 structures deep it would produce broken code.
Fortunately Macro/11 was a thing of beauty, reminds me pretty much of the 68000 assembly language which is probably my favourite micro-processor dialect of assembly.
Up until 3 or for years ago
* The boston Globe
* THe new york times
and many other papers will still being edited, subbed and produced on PDP/11 hardware. Quite a few large papers in the US still are although its decreasing rapidly....
Fond memories indeed.
Roger.
