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digital equipment corporation · maynard, massachusetts
MEMORY ADDRESS
EMA
RUN
Straight 8 at Rockville Science Day 2024

The Program Coordinator for Rockville Science Center invited me to exhibit at Rockville Science Day This was supposed to be a repeat of the demo I did at last years Rockville Science Day but with the equipment fully working. Things worked better but the A/D would not work so couldn't demonstrate signal processing. I was planning to use a touch tone phone and use the FFT to show how the keys are encoding with the two tones. Touch tone phones are only a couple years older than the computer being introduced in 1963.

Primary demo was bouncing ball simulation since that was more STEM than the games or punching text on paper tape.

The A/D worked fine after hauling it back home.

Bouncing ball simulation program. This is rewritten version of the BASIC games version to work under EDUsystem 10 4k BASIC and run faster but still look similar. The one from the BASIC games couldn't keep teletype printing at its blistering 10 characters per second.

Sample run

RUN
THIS SIMULATES MOTION OF BALL THROWN STRAIGHT UP

TIME INCREMENT (SEC) TRY 0.1
?.1

VELOCITY (FPS) 15 TO 30
?20

COEFFICIENT OF ELASTICITY < 1
?.9

FEET

 7 
        *
 6     *  *
      *
 5         *        **
     *             *
 4          *     *    *      * *
    *                        *   *      **
 3               *      *              *  *
             *              *     *   *    *    * *
 2 *                     *                     *   *
                *          *       * *      *       *
 1            *                               *
                          *                          *
 0             *          *         *        *
...........................................................
..
  0       1         2         3         4         5        
 6 
                              SECONDS


TIME INCREMENT (SEC) TRY 0.1

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Computer and peripherals (152K)  Ephemera (104K)
Kids running demo (119K)

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Feel free to contact me, David Gesswein djg@pdp8online.com with any questions, comments on the web site, or if you have related equipment, documentation, software etc. you are willing to part with.  I am interested in anything PDP-8 related, computers, peripherals used with them, DEC or third party, or documentation. 

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