[Beowulf] Re: Religious wars

[John Hearns]

On Wed, 2008-07-23 at 22:54 -0400, Bob Drzyzgula wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 09:06:03PM -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> > 
> > "Robert G. Brown" <rgb at phy.duke.edu> writes:
> > > Note that Bob and I started out on systems with far less than 100 MB
> > > of DISK and perhaps a MB of system memory on a fat SERVER in the
> > > latter 80's.  And the P(o)DP(eople) made do with even less in the
> > > early 80's.
> > 
> > My first machine was a PDP-8. 4k of 12 bit words of genuine magnetic
> > core memory, and two DECtape units with some small amount of storage
> > (I can't remember, but I think it was on the order of 100k). I believe
> > there are icons on my modern desktop that take up more space than that
> > whole machine had for core.
> 
> Although it wasn't my first machine [1], I did work with an
> admittedly-old-at-the-time PDP-8 for a while in the early
> 1980s. It was used to run a Perkin-Elmer microdensitometer
> (think quarter-million-dollar film scanner). 

My first machine was a PDP 11/45, which was installed at my fathers
place of work in the Southern General Hospital in Glasgow.
The Diagnostic Methodology Researtch Unit - they did early research in
computer assisted diagnosis of GI complaints, using a green CRT terminal
which asked the patient questions. Coded in Fortran (of course), and
they used Baysian statistics which in those days was pretty cutting edge
stuff.

I also remember programming on the HP 85 belonging to the Professor in
the unit http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp85.htm