Re:Handwritten coding sheets for Burroughs 205 Algol (1960) ...
by aap_ on Saturday September 10, 2016 @03:42AM
(#12468165)
> When DEC shipped the PDP-11 series the front panel was gone
That's not true. The earlier models definitely had front panels. Only the very latest had reduced or no front panels.
There was a "front panel" on every computer that showed the registers and memory. You could "single step" through your program to see what was in the registers. When DEC shipped the PDP-11 series the front panel was gone. I didn't know how I was going to debug. (Imagine single-stepping a program that runs on a 3 GHz machine.)
Next task was to transfer the program to paper tape using a piece of plastic with a slot for the tape, 8 holes, and a slim rod to punch out the bits. Be sure to leave a couple extra bytes so you can "hot patch" the program. This involved changing the bits into a jump to an address where you had punched new instructions.
Oddly though, I don't see the literate programming markup. I guess that's on the next page.