[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

[Jorge Amodio]

It’s a very cool replica, finished to put it together few weeks ago. I also have the PiDP-11 and PiDP-8 from Oscar.

If you are into retro-computing totally worth the $$

Cheers
-Jorge

> On Jun 6, 2024, at 09:39, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> 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
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