[ih] A large team of tech nostalgia enthusiasts have made a PiDP-10, a replica of the PDP-10 mainframe computer first launched by the Digital Equipment Corporation in 1966

[the keyboard of geoff goodfellow]

EXCERPT:

... Why? Why go to all this trouble? First, there’s the historical
importance. Built from 1959 to the early 1970s, the PDP machines were
groundbreaking. Not only were they much cheaper than the giant mainframes
used by the military and large corporations, they were designed as
multipurpose, fully interactive machines. You didn’t have to produce
programs on punch cards which were then handed to the IT department, who
would run them through the computer, which provided a print-out, which
you’d debug maybe a day later. With the PDPs, you could type directly into
the computer and test the results immediately.

These factors led to an extraordinary burst of experimentation. Most modern
programming languages, including C, began on DEC machines; a PDP-10 was the
centre of the MIT AI Lab, the room in which the term artificial
intelligence was invented. “PDP-10 computers dominated Arpanet, which was
the forerunner of Internet,” says Lars Brinkhoff. “Internet protocols were
prototyped on PDP-10s, PDP-11s and other computers. The GNU project was
inspired by the free sharing of software and information on the PDP-10.
Stephen Hawking’s artificial voice came from a DECtalk device, which came
from Dennis Klatt’s voice-synthesis research begun on a PDP-9.”

PDPs were installed in university labs around the world, where they were
embraced by an emerging generation of engineers, scientists and coders –
the original computer hackers. Steve Wozniak got started with coding on a
PDP-8, a smaller, cheaper machine which sold in its thousands to hobbyists
– its operating system, OS/8, was the forefather of MS-DOS. Teenage
schoolkids Bill Gates and Paul Allen used to sneak into the University of
Washington to program PCP-10s. And it was on PDP computers that MIT student
Steve Russell and a group of friends designed the shoot-’em-up, SpaceWar!,
one of the first-ever video games to run on a computer...

[...]
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/06/reinventing-the-pdp-10

-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True