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(Vintage April 1, 1997. Not all my writings are well received)The main operating system for the PDP/8 computers, O/S 8, stores the year of file creation in a field that is 3 bits. This will cause some interesting problems, come the year 2000. (more so than it has already caused every 8 years) I've GOT it !!!! I've just figured out how to make my next million ! (Next million, because the first is the hardest, so I'm skipping it) Build a little box, that sits between your PDP-8 (straight, L, M, F, A, E, S, whatever), and your ASR-33 (or if you are really lucky, an LA35!!). Only has to intercept the outbound stuff from the CPU. So a 20mA to TTL converter, and into a UART at 110 baud. This goes into the 8051 that's in the box. The program that runs on the 8051 has a stripped down version of regexp running on it that looks for strings that look like dates. When it sees a date, it "patches it" to the correct date by appending/prepending the year. Then out thru the UART, TTL->20mA, and off to the ASR-33. I'm ready to start building these in volume, send me your orders now. (Actually I should probably design it first before taking orders :-) With a bit of effort, I am sure I could handle dates all the way thru to the year 3792 , in blocks of 7 years. (bonus marks for figuring why the year 3792 will break my design). I wonder if all PDP-8 computers will be retired by then??? What about the dedicated hobbyists?? |