Always in search of the essential “fabric” of computing, I decided to create yet another PDP-8 emulator. In plain C, and in as few lines of code as possible - without resorting to obfuscated C. It ended up being 256 LOC.
The PDP-8 was kicked into the world in 1965. It’s an atractive target, because its instruction set is minimal, with quite a number of applications available for it.
My goal was to implement enough of the core to support FOCAL-69, a BASIC-like programming language from DEC, which supports interactive editing and floating-point, all in 4K 12-bits words of memory.
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