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of honorable old-timerhood among hackers to have cut one's teeth on a PDP-10. See TOPS-10, ITS, AOS, BLT, DDT, DPB, EXCH, HAKMEM, JFCL, LDB, pop, push. |
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PDP-20 n. The most famous computer that never was. PDP-10 computers running the TOPS-10 operating system were labeled 'DECsystem-10' as a way of differentiating them from the PDP-11. Later on, those systems running TOPS-20 were labeled 'DECSYSTEM-20' (the block capitals being the result of a lawsuit brought against DEC by Singer, which once made a computer called 'system-10'), but contrary to popular lore there was never a 'PDP-20'; the only difference between a 10 and a 20 was the operating system and the color of the paint. Most (but not all) machines sold to run TOPS-10 were painted 'Basil Blue', whereas most TOPS-20 machines were painted 'Chinese Red' (often mistakenly called orange). |
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peek n.,vt. (and poke) The commands in most microcomputer BASICs for directly accessing memory contents at an absolute address; often extended to mean the corresponding constructs in any HLL (peek reads memory, poke modifies it). Much hacking on small, non-MMU micros consists of peeking around memory, more or less at random, to find the location where the system keeps interesting stuff. Long (and variably accurate) lists of such addresses for various computers circulate (see interrupt list, the). The results of pokes at these addresses may be highly useful, mildly amusing, useless but neat, or (most likely) total lossage (see killer poke). |
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Since a real operating system provides useful, higher-level services for the tasks commonly performed with peeks and pokes on micros, and real languages tend not to encourage low-level memory groveling, a question like "How do I do a peek in C?" is diagnostic of the newbie. (Of course, OS kernels often have to do exactly this; a real C hacker would unhesitatingly, if unportably, assign an absolute address to a pointer variable and indirect through it.) |
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pencil and paper n. An archaic information storage and transmission device that works by depositing smears of graphite on bleached wood pulp. More recent developments in paper-based technology include improved 'write-once' update devices which use tiny rolling heads similar to mouse balls to deposit colored pigment. All these devices require an operator skilled at so-called 'handwriting' technique. These technologies are ubiquitous outside hackerdom, but nearly forgotten inside it. Most hackers had terrible handwriting to begin with, and years of keyboarding tend to have encouraged it to degrade further. Perhaps for this reason, hackers deprecate |
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