[Simh] Old school programming with wiresnips and a question about debugging standalone assembly

[Alan Frisbie]

On 12/16/2015 03:51 PM, Will Senn wrote:

> If it doesn't come through imagine a guy with a pair of
 > wire cutters snipping off diodes from a ROM card for a PDP11.
 > Is this really how y'all programmed back in the day :)?

Yep, did that back in the day.   Imagine the fun of soldering
diodes back in to correct a mistake or change the program.
True, it was usually just a bootstrap, but it was sure a lot
better than having to toggle it in every time.

The first mini I programmed (Varian 620i in 1968) had only
4096 16-bit words (8K bytes).   I am sure that many others
on this list have similar stories.   Back then we did the
impossible with nothing.

Alan Frisbie