I had an idea for a small project in the real world and in the spirit of so many flights of fancy of youth, it was not really practical, but at least it would do something. However I had forgotten how long it takes to build something in the real world.
I have had a few Linux VMs laying around for a while. Sometimes the best tool for the job is another distro. But there is nothing like running on bare metal. Or a bare metal iMac.
Given how well our old Kindles served us, especially over countless thousands of miles of business trips and vacations, it seemed fitting to bring them back to life with an elegant little project for the literary nerds in us.
I had for years been thinking about digitizing our extensive catalog of recipes, but avoided it since it is a lot of work. However COVID and its first lockdown gave me a lot more time at home and it was a great opportunity to finally take on this task.
Building the PiDP-8/I was a lot of fun and very rewarding. But using it is the nerdy gift that keeps on giving.
Compute like it’s 1967! Load Fortran IV from paper tape. Do some file management on DECtape. Or just toggle in your own machine code program directly into core memory. Why? Because with the PiDP-8/I kit, now you can!