Disk images of the PDP-11/23 version of Edison, and run it in simh

Discussions
1

The Edison System is comprised of both an operating system and programming environment. Published in a book by Per Brinch hansen, Programming a Personal Computer.
I have this book since 1982 and it has always been an inspiration for simplicity in programming.

Jos Dreessen received a disk set of the Edison system from Günter Dotzel of Modulaware.
And he made images of it.

This diskset contains the whole Edison system, binaries and sources of all programs.
Even the sources not published in the book Programming a Personal Computer by Per Brinch Hansen like the Alva PDP-11 ‘assembler’.
The program edisonFiledump is written to extract the files from the disk images.
Therefore the structure of the disk was studied, most of it was somehow documented in the book.

Read further here: Edison – a Multiprocessor Language – Pascal for small machines

Run the Edison system in simh PDP-11 emulator

In the Edison archive you find a folder called simh.
In it is the PDP-11 simh windows precompiled executable and a simh config file called config.simh.
You can also compile simh yourself on other systems.
The config file contains the bootloader, Peter de Wachter constructed this.

With this and the disk images dumped you can run the Edison system.

Edison_PDP11
Edison_PDP111846×3186 646 KB

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Oh, thanks for the PDF of the book!

10k lines for a complete system is most excellent. (I think Smalltalk was about the same order of magnitude.)

3

I have a PDF of the book, but now I can run the software.
I was thinking of bootstrapping that to a 18 bit machine I had.(Not a PDP11).
I am working now on a 36 bit hardware design, with char and short unsigned so I
don’t expect to be able to port that. I need to read the book again just to be sure.

4

Thanks, this looks interesting. We had a subscription to Software Practice and Experience where I worked in the early '80s and I remember reading articles by Per Brinch Hansen.

I did recently play with his earlier system called Solo on a Simh PDP-11. Edison looks like an improvement on the version of Pascal used in Solo, it will be interesting to give it a try..

5

Re-reads the book. There was it seems a IBM PC version of it as well.
I like Edison.

6

I have also SOLO operating system with Concurrent and Sequential Pascal compilers with sources ruinning in simh:

SOLO Operating system running in simh – Pascal for small machines

pdp11

PDP-11 simulator Open SIMH V4.1-0 Current git commit id: 6e9324e0+uncommitted-changes
sim> set cpu 11/45
Disabling XQ
sim> att rk1 solo.dsk
sim> att lpt solo_printer.txt
sim> show cpu
CPU 11/45, FPP, MMU, autoconfiguration enabled, idle disabled
256KB
sim> boot rk1

SYSTEM READY
DO:

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