Holy crap, Jeff, that's amazing. I guess we need to find one of these machines too. On 11/10/2022 1:34 PM, Jeffrey Jonas via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Why can't I ever find things like this?
I had a similar experience finding my high schools abandoned LGP-21. One day, I wondered "where does all the line printer paper come from?" since it magically appeared when needed. I discovered the supply room with then-current supplies (greenbar tractor-feed line printer paper and tab cards from JTC, paper tape and roll paper for teletypes).
In the back was a long abandoned LGP-21 with some manuals and such. One of the manuals was signed out by a friend's older sister!
I had no clue how to use the boot-loader so I spent a week or 2 just poking at the console learning the instruction set and running really small programs. Using the oscilloscope (to view the registers) and Flexowriter was FUN!
The LGP-21 is the transistorized version of the LGP-30 with a fixed-head disk (not drum), but functionally equivalent. *THAT* is when I groked why my dad was ecstatic when SOAP was available (the self optimizing compiler for drum machines: kinda optimized the placement of variables vs. doing it totally manually like MEL A REAL PROGRAMMER!)
-- jeff jonas