You will notice that the switch colors were grouped by three because people at DEC were used to working in octal.
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Can you dig this groovy berry-colored 1975 computer?
I dig-it-all!
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Perfect. Great thing about classic games is that they don’t need (or sometimes just never got) patches.
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A guy I worked with told me about how he would compile some NOVA (PDP-11 competitor) code in Austin onto paper tape, then drive 8 hours to the telescope at McDonald Observatory, then test it and patch the binary code via the front panel toggle switches. Poor guy - the spartan NOVA had miniature bat-handle toggle switches, unlike the luxurious rocker switches of the PDP-11 series. These folks could have learned some front panel design lessons from the experts at DEC.
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Ours was a PDP-8/S, in soothing beige tones:
Are there still FOCAL interpreters around?
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This would be a bit more manageable.
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My high school in Modesto, CA had this PDP 11/70, and I played Zork on it in 1979. It was called DUNGEO - short for Dungeon. It had a 6 character name as that was the max number of letters allowed.
When Zork was released for home computers, I was immediately disappointed as it wasn’t complete vs the game I placed on the Dec. Had to get Zork 2 before you had most of the original game.
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When i worked on PDP-11/45 and PDP-11/70 computers in the early 80s we joked that PDP stood for Purple Dark Purple for the two tone color scheme.
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cute…but not enough RAM (mine had 500K) 
and seems no UNIBUS ?
Yep, you could bootstrap it from the switches. Kinda amazing to think about that now.
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But it did have Tetris.
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We used to see how sophisticated of a program we could write that could be 100% loaded on the toggles in an acceptable period of time. The one I remember best was a program where you could use the toggles to play ‘music’ on an AM radio we’d taped to the side of the computer.
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how about that…I had it in my head it was written on a PC clone, even have an apparently false memory of a picture of the guy who wrote it sitting in front of a brightly coloured Soviet PC. Ah well, pretty minor as my “deluded memories” go.
Tetris was ported to the PC in 1986, in the USSR, so your memory of the photo might be right. Or the computer might have been one of the other Soviet PDP-11 clones, some of which could be mistaken for PCs.
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That’s pretty much what I started on. The only time I ever used the octal number system, since it was a 12 bit machine. Th entire instruction set was only 8 instructions.
So PUSH, PULL (or “POP”), bit shift left, bit shift right, compare/branch, increment, decrement, and store to memory? Or did it leave off stack commands for something else (like a “jump to” command)?
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You can get a nifty phisical control panel to control a Raspberry Pi based PDP-11 emulator.
Gas was 25 cents a gallon way back then in the ice ages.
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Ah yes the time when running code was still slow enough to be audio frequency.
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I wonder if it seems “cool” to us now because it’s the same generation of interface technology that was immortalized in classic sci-fi like Star Wars, Alien, and Tom Baker’s Doctor Who
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