The museum is planning an event in 2018 called 'Grand Digital' showing working systems from each decade since the 1950s. I am showing the PDP8 for the 1960s session. Which means I need a functioning PDP8 to show that will work on demand! The challenge is for each machine to produce as many entries as possible in the Fibonacci series.
As we are showing systems, rather than pure CPU power, I am showing the PDP8 with an ASR33 teletype. This of course limits the output to just 10 characters per second. Despite that, simple addition would soon overflow a single word on the PDP8, and double word quickly runs out. Instead I have written a program using variable length string arrays. The code is here.
The museum has many PDP8 models - from Straight Eights to DecMates - but the most 'portable' that still has the flashing lights expected is the PDP8/F. However, it was not hugely well when retrieved from the store.
This page is a record of my entries from the machine log book and subsequent progress. The aim is a working PDP8/F with a pair of M8650/5 cards - one for the console and one to support a 'serial disc' to allow me to run OS/8