Introduction to the PDP 11, Unit 1, System Overview 

This takes me back! The funny thing is that what he is talking about is still in my memory banks! It feels like its "yesterday" very strange feeling. We did everything with the DEC's in octal. I was as fluent in octal as decimal. Very strange indeed. I suspect I could still boot one up. We used them in flight test for the government..... The unibus was revolutionary, as were the "flip chips" in the DEC's - All still just feels very natural and current. They were beautiful machines, made by people with great pride in what they were doing - we could not have done our job without them..... Thank you!

I definitely need to see the rest of the series!

Thanks, this is great resource for we "young" people to get a sense of what was computing like back then.

This takes me back decades to when I just became a "teenager" and started learning about computers.

Ah yes. Spent several years working with PDP-11/34's and 03's. Their architecture was rather elegant. Mostly orthogonal instruction set and no separate I/O instructions. You could plug in an extra IC of microcode into the 11/03 and that added floating-point add, subtract, multiply, and divide instructions. Cool stuff, but expensive and not too speedy. The RT-11 operating system was really, really, really stripped-down! You got a line editor, a FORTRAN compiler, a linker, and that's about it. The FORTRAN compiler didn't generate machine code, it generated some weird threaded code, basically in-line addresses of short code subroutines that were sequentially jumped through. Cool in an academic way but not at all fast. If you pulled out all the stops you could run a (small) program in the background, but that was a lot of bother. A PDP-8 was much cheaper and faster for simple programs. The OS didn't have any memory protection so it was pretty easy to crash the system. That was my first realization that newer and fancier wasn't always clearly better.

Great materials, thank you so much for making them available! Now I need the workbook to continue my PDP-11 training! :)

Cut my teeth on an 11/34 and then went to work for Dec and had an 11/70 running RSX-11M Plus. The 11/70 would periodically crash with a memory parity error. Field service traced it to a broken wire in the Unibus. God I loved those times and miss them so much

I would like to see the Introduction to Digital Logic course!

Would love to see all of these videos posted!

dec badge # 114xxx 1981-2013 NYC field service. Survived compaq and hp mergers. Worked on most of the pdp 11 line and all peripherals and all of the vax and alpha systems as well. Loved the work until we became swap monkeys.

Love it. I was going to ask who did the narration.I would love to see current training videos adopt the same style.

This is fantastic, we are still running a few PDP's for process control at work and I am now just learning to work with them. It's fascinating! I need to find more information on them.

Basic DEC Hookup 101..Very Well Done..

Are there more of those Videos available ? i love these!!

Jerry, are the other videos available anywhere? And a *complete* Student Workbook to go with the training package? I've got some (Q-BUS) PDP-11s that I know almost nothing about, so I've never even powered them up! :(

such futuristic music!

Please! This is great stuff!

Thanks, this is great. I have a PDP11/73 so found this really interesting. Are you going to remake the rest of them too?

There is a Commodore 64 on the chair at 14:00. Time travel?

I'd like to know what happened to the Digital programmers. The Boston Globe ran an article about one and he was quite bitter that he couldn't even get a "McJob" anymore. I think he meant a temporary consultant job. My company wouldn't even talk to those guys unless they had IBM mainframe experience with IIMS, DB2 and CICS experience. It wasa frightening to see how quickly one's life can go down the toilet through no fault of one's own.

We were taught in the Soviet Union on PDP-11 in 1990.

I miss that voice he was on all DEC training material. I was exposed to just about all training for DEC. I started as A Field Service in 1978. Their training was excellent. I lasted for three decades. It was quite a life long experience. Who was that voice? My Badge was five digits. Yours may have been less.

Will you make the other parts available?

"pdp-11 vs traditioal computers" I guess the PDP 11 didn't have spell check.