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Original song |
A Song of Reproduction |
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Original artist |
Flanders and Swann |
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Filk author |
Tony Duell |
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Intro |
The processor 'of storage 4 k byte' is (of course) a Philips P850, a minicomputer noted for its limited memory (4 k bytes was the maximum), RISC-like instruction set, and total lack of speed. After that, the PDP11/45 was a great improvement EI set = Extended Instruction Set, i.e. the XOR, Multiply and Divide instructions etc DW11-B was a DEC option to use Q-Bus cards on a UNIBUS PDP11. They are much desired by PDP11 enthusiasts, although they can cause problems NXM error = Non eXistant Memory error - what happens if there is a bus time-out during a DMA transfer.
Don't try to make too much sense of the spoken part in the middle... It makes more sense than the original, anyway.
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A Song of Computation
I had a little processor
With storage 4 K byte
And with an octal program
It ran throughout the night
And then they optimised it
It was much faster then
And we loaded Fortran Programs
To make it slow again
Today for computation
I'm as eager as can be
Count me among the faithful fans
of high end P - D - P
High end PDP
45's the one for me
With cartridge disk and EI set
and 6 foot rack mount cabinet
floating point boards too
complete with M M U
All the lowest bits either clear or set
What they mean now I quite forget
Still there's enough range there for national debt
With my high end PDP
(spoken)
Who configured this for you anyway?
DEC field service ?!?!?
Ooooh what a shoddy job they made of it!
Suprised they let you run that configuration on this processor, the priorities are all wrong. If you move the tape drive down the bus after the console port, and then re-assign the address of the system disk, then you'll still only get adequate performance if you run modified software
I see you've got your system disk on the Q-Bus! Take that though a DW11-B bus convertor, and via your A-leg Mux into the ALU If you're running multi-user, you're going to loose grants. Try to load the OS that way and what'll you get
A NXM error!
High end PDP
RSX version 3
I've a shell right here that you won't escape
On miles of 9-track recording tape
18 bit address
Will prove a great success
With the console switch, at a single touch
The lisiting comes in double dutch
But I never did care for data much
With my high end PDP
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