Questions tagged [pdp-8]

What is the physical size of a PDP-8? The photographs I found seem to be evenly divided between showing it as a compact unit that looks maybe one foot high, and as a tall cabinet maybe five or six feet high. Conjecture: the different sizes…

The PDP-8 was a popular 12-bit minicomputer of the late sixties. It used word addressing, so that it always dealt in 12-bit words, of which it could address 4096 with a full bank of core memory. In practice, a typical minicomputer would spend a…

PDP-8 heavily relied on conditional skips: instructions that under some circumstances would skip the following instruction. Among them are, for example: ISZ SZA/SNA/etc. group of insns many IO insns While it is perfectly clear what should happen…

The extended memory controller on the PDP-8 (the original one, sometimes called the Straight-8) apparently had difficulty when selecting a datafield that didn't exist: On machines with 8K or more, an attempt to change the data field to a…