I have a PiDP-10 - and it's a blast from both hardware and software perspectives. One can run ITS (Incompatible Timeshare System), but also TOPS-10 and TOPS-20 OS's. BTW: I didn't restore the PDP-1 by my self - I was a member of the original RESTORATION TEAM that did the restoration.
Thanks Lyle, great insights in the vid, fantastic that you pushed all this stuff along. I also like Marc's enthusiasm! Oscar, you've found your 'tribe' of old computer nuts!
The keyboard on a Linotype typesetting machine was arranged according to letter frequency, in columns from left to right. The first two columns read ETAOIN SHRDLU. If the typesetter (the human) made a typo, there was no backspace or undo, so they would 'run out' the current piece of hot metal type being cast by the machine by running their fingers down the first two or three columns of keys. It's a type of filler text (like Lorem Ipsum) that's been showing up in various places in popular culture since at least the 1920s. 😻
Yes, they were really beautiful. I have worked with real 8i's and the KA-10. What a machine that was. Never did work with an 11/70. I always thought the KA-10 panel was the most amazing looking.
I think a lot of the people who designed them loved science fiction when they were growing up, and tried to make them look like something that would appear in a science fiction movie. When you think of it, the flashing lights were in a sense just pixels in a very low resolution video display. We don't need flashing lights anymore because we can easily get a video monitor with tens of millions of "flashing lights" for a couple hundred dollars. The thing that's missing in video displays is the lovely "analog" effect that the incandescent lights exhibited when displaying very high speed "ones" and "zeros." The speed could easily be so high that the lights glowed with brightness intermediate to "full on" and "full off." This created a beguiling degree of complexity and nuance in the appearance of the display. The machines of that time were romantic, in a sense. They revealed their inner details to a much greater, more immediate extent than today's computers do. Of course, they operated at one thousandth the speed, and the amount of memory they had available was more like one millionth of what we routinely have access to now. Very nice reproductions though.
@@Obladgolated the goal of the blinkenlights was to be able to monitor what the machine was doing in real time, but by the 70s the machines were already so fast that the light display wasn't of much use, since all the lights ended up flickering at high speed at the same time until something went wrong. It's not so much that we don't need the lights anymore, it's more that computers are now so fast and complicated that there's no way to display anything useful that way, so it's more practical to use the more complex monitoring and analysis tools that came about with graphics displays
@@thesteelrodent1796 You missed my point. Yes the machines were faster than the lights could respond, but you could still use them to debug loops and other repetitive structures by watching the way they changed brightness, as different patterns of instructions caused characteristic sequences of addresses to be decoded, and in the case of PDP machines, the major state generator to spend more time in this state or that state as you developed your code and added more functions. These characteristic sequences were revealed by changes in brightness of the lights, which integrated their duty cycle by thermal inertia, at least before DEC went to LEDs in 1974 or 1975.
@@Obladgolated Don't know about all that. For today flashing lights would just always be on. The machines back then ran in the Mhz or maybe even Khz range. These were very early computers and basic. So you often needed a way to get a program initially loaded. Switches and lights were a cheap way. Heck, even the 8i had the RIM loader printed on the front panel. Remember these were being sold to schools and small companies initially. And I feel people were more proud to show their design skills then. They wanted something that looked good and also functioned. DEC was the leader with these small "computers" at first. There were no ROMs or the like to start the computer from scratch. Whatever the reason I am glad they had blinkenlights computers.
Back in the day, I wrote a lot of PDP-10 assembly code used to control 90 foot tall robots in automated warehouse systems for a company called Eaton Kenway. Also programmed PDP-11 with Fortran and IBM Series/1 running EDX (Event Driven Executive) OS and programing with EDL (Event Driven Language), an interpreted language (these might be something you don't yet know about, Marc). All in the late 70s to early 80s. And all for Eaton Kenway. Thanks for yet another stroll down memory lane.
My dad tells a story about how he was working with researchers in a hospital. They put through an order for a PDP-11 computer and it was declined, so they sent through a new order for a programmed data processor and were able to get it across the line 😅 2:12
This is so beautiful! I've dropped an xmas gift hint with a friend. My first post-school job, in 1974, was primary operator of the KA10 at WPI. Soon after, I wrote a replacement for systat and the queue manager, which got me into the system programming group :) 50 years later, I still remember a lot of the tops-10 assembly language, and even a bit of teco.
In 1999 my employer of the time was dumping their PDP/11 machines because they weren't Y2K compliant. The whole PDP/11 at our site, complete with tape drive and RL02 disk drives was heading for the skip. However a collector emailed me, he had hoped to get the PDP/11 from another site of the same employer but they had dumped it already. I dismantled the PDP/11 and got it onto a company van to send to him, and he got it running again. Alas the tape drive and RL02 drives (fully working and some with recent bearings having been fitted) ended up the in skip.
Sometimes I think we love those machines for the same reasons that kids love dinosaurs: a) They are long extinct, so they have this alien feel to it. b) it's fun to spot features that survived evolution, and others that have gone extict with them. EMACS on the PDP-10!! No passwords on ITS!! c) the thought "how was it possible for those creatures to once rule the world with THOSE kind of brains?" I have two PiDP-8is, one PiDP-11 (running 2.11BSD and crunching some seismic data every night) an now one PiDP-10 (ITS). Great kits, high quality, lots of software to go with it.
True, but many of us used these actual machines. Dinosaurs we did not interact with. But I still love dinosaurs. My brother and I used to play with plastic dinosaurs as kids.
I have built BOTH of Oscar's PDP/8 and 11. It was great fun, and it inspired me to create an HP21MX (HP1000/HP2100 etc..) emulator. It runs SIMH as well, and is Raspberry Pi based, in a full size panel. I would be happy to share information for anybody who is interested. Well Done Oscar et al !!!
Hi Marc! I saw you had a picture of KI-587 there for a second. we had LOTS of fun restoring it for the LCM. There was plenty of fun restoring the KA, and the CDC-6500 we had too. Thanks for tweaking my memories! Nothing beats the time I had at LCM. Bruce Sherry, former Principal Engineer at LCM.
This is so strange! Today I went to the Science Museum in London to see Tim Hunkin's exhibition one last time, and saw a PDP-10 in another exhibit. I get home and enjoy your video on it!! Those switches look amazing,
Marc, I have to say, that your channel is a wonder. Knowing what you have behind you in terms of accomplishments, you could be owning a small tropical island and not care the least bit for the world. Instead, you are giving back so much to the community, with an awesome team, I can't even... I love your work, your videos and you are actually someone to look up to.
This brings back memories. I worked in a neuroscience lab in 1980 with grad students digitizing rat brain slices by hand from a microscope with X-Y LVDTs on the stage which could be read by A/D. The Z axis was controlled using a stepper motor to move the focal point up and down within a brain slice. The heart of the system was a PDP-11/34 running RT-11. Peripherals were two 8 inch floppies, two RL-02 hard drives, LA-36 console, Hazeltine 1552 VDT, and a DEC VR17 vector display. I don’t recall the number of the board generating the vectors; it may have been an M7013. We wrote assembly routines we could call in FORTRAN to generate vector images. I am thinking it was probably M7013 because it could run the same Lunar Lander game as a DEC GT40. Lunar Lander was a lab favorite. If you went to the right lunar up location, there was a McDonald’s and an astronaut would get out of the LEM and order a Big Mac.
Must say I really fancy a PiDP-8 - I worked for DEC in UK from mid 80s to mid 00s - started as PDP-11 support engineer and 'progressed' to PDP-8s after a couple of years. The PDP-8 team was small and proud - those old babies needed a lot of love and care, especially the DECtapes and paper tape readers! Now where is my can of WD40? I know we had a couple of customers with PDP-10s still in the 80s, but I was never lucky enough to see one in the flesh - only via a modem on a VT52, or maybe a VT220 😂 Wonderful video - thanks Marc and team - really enjoyed it!
They're not kidding about how "security" was handled on ITS - in "later years" (1985ish) it was common for curious undergrads to log in as RMS (no password - there were some things like connecting to other systems that required you be logged in as *somebody*, they just weren't picky about who), and then someone would message you and ask you to please create an account with your own name on it if you were going to actually use the system and not just be a tourist. Sort of "onboarding via honeypot" :-)
Outstanding! Amalgamating the Raspberry Pi into a PDP 10 is genius. The PDP 10 was the first computer I ever used in 1970, My school had a dial up TTY33 to Hatfield Polytechnic which was part of a project that affected and educated thousands of people and the Pi my favourite computer now which has touched and educated millions.
I have an 8 and 11 on my office wall. People who visit are mesmerised at them, even better when I challange them to Space Wars on the 8... including the emulator for the original round screen.
The announcing of the culprit who crashed the system to all reminded me of what would happen to anyone who broke the mac rom build - newspapers all over the floor of your cubicle because you were a "bad dog". It happened to me. Once. It was the nineties.
Must say, best video of all time. I mean, thank you for sharing and wow, it's crazy. I wonder how in 50 years from now, will someone do demos about nowadays systems. History is about to repeat itself. And second of all, wonder if the MIT spirit from that era is still alike today.
This is an amazing work of art! I checked the link, and I was shocked at how low of a price he is asking for these----sharing the love of these systems is obviously much more important to him that making the most profit he can. I'm truly impressed!
Oscar agonized a great deal about the price, figuring out how to keep it as low as possible. He truly has a passion for putting computer history in the hands of ordinary people.
The late 1960s price for the KA10 CPU (what the PiDP-10 emulates) was $160,000. A 16kW (36 bit word + parity) was around $35K. (About the price of a house.) Hmm, maybe more - a dollar a byte was a good price for PDP-11 core.
I was fortunate to meet Oscar at VCF East some years ago when he was just completing his remarkable pi PDP-8. I bought his original model before the switches were updated. I may just have to buy another, the accurate switches are amazing.
I learned BASIC on a DEC PDP 11/70 in high school. The computer lab consisted of a DECwriter and an acoustic coupler modem. I spent many hours after school playing Adventure.
Hello Oscar, The new PiDP-10 looks just amazing, like it's brothers. You do such great work on these, the detailing is wonderful. Maybe some day I can justify owning one.. Just sent out two more of your nifty Kim UNO kits this morning. There is still interest out there, people seem to really like them. Hope you are well, Bill in St Paul
Oscar is a really great guy. I worked a bunch with the Kim-Uno years back, and made my own variant of it, using two different keyboards and a common cathode vrs anode display. He was really great with discussing changes to the emulation firmware and such. I'm really glad to see him making an appearance here! :D
I fell in love with a PDP-11/44 when I was in high school during the first half of the '80s. Then I studied computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University during the second half of the '80s, where I used DECSYSTEM-20s. I also got to see the Computer Science Department's PDP-10. I have one of Oscar's PiDP-11/70 kits, and I recently received a PiDP-8 kit. (I still need to assemble both of them...) I can't wait to order a PiDP-10 when Oscar and friends begin accepting orders again! 😎👍❤️
Me too, I remember people hanging around outside the door to the computer room waiting for someone else to enter the boot loader :) My final year project was an AI that played Monopoly, I wrote it initially in Algol and translated it to PDP-8 assembler. My friend got a better mark for his project: an implementation of the trivial game of noughts & crosses (tic-tac-toe) mainly because it used the Direct View Storage Tube (a primitive graphics terminal) to draw the game - and I was the one that wrote that bit :(
And my venture into "computer music" - a program that was a simple loop whose length was determined by the setting of the panel switches to generate different frequencies. I then had an AM radio tuned off channel next to the PDP-8 which picked up the EMI emitted by the computer and played the note. I can't remember now if I took it to the next step of storing a tune as data, I suspect my initial tests showed there wasn't a lot of promise!
@@TonyWhitley I had to program it in Assembler, self-modifying code and all that. I was a Ph.D. student at the time and used a PDP-8S cast off by the high energy physics dept to read in paper tape, translate to a different format and punch out paper tape that could be read by the university computer. Them paper tape readers and punches were something else! In my first job (1980) I was handed a project "we were waiting for somebody with PDP-8 assembler" to modify the control system for the bright beer bottling section of the Carlsberg brewery in Northampton. 12 KW of memory running about 100 parallel tasks and controlling as many valves and motors. It's amazing what you can do in assembler if you really have to.
I had some happy days in the late 80s working on PDP-11/73 for V.G. (Vacuum Generators) Scientific who made surface science instruments i.e. microscopes of varying types. Mainly in Pascal if I remember correctly. Lots of fun developing code with overlays and remapping of the 8th address page register and so on :)
I confess that all of this was new to me except Shrdlu - I have fond memories of running a BASIC version of that (and many other AI programs) on my Amstrad CPC6128 in the 1980s!
Thank you so much for this video, which is both interesting and informative. I have only built a PiDP8/I so far, but am inspired by all the work being done on the other models. Looking forward to reliving the years I spent on PDP11s.
I attended York university '82-'84. They had a linked KL-10 and KS-10, both running TOPS-10. It was the University's main computing resource, doing document formatting for the historians, statistics for the sociologists, SPICE simulations (in overnight batch mode) for the electronic engineers, and so on. Fortunately, in my 2nd and 3rd years we used VAX11/780 running Unix.
I went to a mit reunion with my dad last year and talked to guys that knew the founders of Dec from mit. Apparently part of what brought them together was a model railroad club that had a coke machine that would attract students…
“Tech Model Railroad Club”, been their many times in the distant past, it was in an old building leftover from WW2, that has since been demolished and of course a new building replaced it.. yes, the coke machine could vend on a computer input 👍
@@mwolrich I went by their location on 265 Massachusetts Avenue a few weeks ago. The railroad was in there, but otherwise it looked quite empty and abandoned. The Tetris game worked though.
Regarding "shrdlu": My Dad was in the Signal Corp in WWII. He told me that radio teletype operators would reply "Repeat after etaoin shrdlu." after receiving garbled text. Of course, this was an inside joke as the sender would have no idea idea where to begin resending. Years later I learned the connection this string has with the Linotype machine.
I am still assembling my PiDP-10. My PiDP-8 runs TSS/8 as that was the machine I learned computers on and the OS that we used. My 11 currently has no Rasp Pi to run it so it's on the shelf in the closet. Can't wait to see my 10 run. I worked with a real KA-10 so this will be fun.
Back in 2000 I encountered a PDP11/44 still in use, running a pre-press RIP for a modern laser imagesetter. There was just 1 guy in NZ who could still maintain the system!
Marc. I am the guy who reverse engineered decwar. The first multiplayer online designed on a decsystem-10. Let me know if you would like to take a look.
Think you meant "reverse" over "reserve". But no problem. We know what you meant. I never played Decwar. Is that like Operator wars on the 10? Never played that either, but I have heard of both.
Really cool. The PDP-1 demo with that radar tube is what inspired me to build my ads-b radar scope that runs on a raspi. It takes live ads-b data from an SDR dongle and displays it on a 5 inch P7 phosphor radar tube. I also wrote some other programs for it such as munching squares since it's not much more than an XY scope interfaced to the raspi with a pair of 2-channel DACs.
I have such a tube, but nothing to drive it. If you could help me with that, I'd be very grateful. I'd like to have it run Spacewar and SHRDLU in style.
@@larsbrinkhoff The deflection circuit and coils I used are pretty terrible and non-linear. It also doesn't focus well. My project made it to hackaday a while ago: /2023/04/15/real-radar-scope-crt-shows-flights-using-ads-b/ If it's just the bare tube then getting a power supply for it should be your first priority. That's where I started anyways. I made my own flyback transformer by resin 3D printing a spool that would fit a core that I recycled from another failed flyback transformer I got from my TDS784 scope. I can give you the design, but it might not fit just any old flyback transformer core.
@@larsbrinkhoff Keep in mind, I had to re-wind my flyback HV coil multiple times because it kept arcing over. Don't be like me initially. I ended up insulating the inside of the spool with some kapton tape and RTV, then insulate and wrap every 40-100 winds with more kapton tape and RTV. (They call it 'kaptop' tape because it kapt'-it-on). Also a good idea to leave a few extra taps on your other lower voltage winds including the 6.3v heater wind so that you can more easily change things later without re-winding or scrapping your painstakingly wound transformer.
Took me back to when I first started work, in 1986. There was a PDP 11/70 sitting in a back room. We were a short step ahead in what was actually in use - we ran a VAX 11/784 (or 785, I forget) cluster.
I bought already the pdp8 some time ago , now I have to place the pdp 10 onto my near wishlist ... great work ... also the pdp 11 is on my wishlist ... UPDATE: just preordered the Pdp10 version.
Did my thesis using Stanford AI's PDP-6/10 combination. Great memories. Last machine I was able to program and debug at the machine language level. We used to replace the default null job with a one dimensional version of Pong, that ran in the front panel lights. ITS's top level control was a debugging system which, with some other early work, motivated much of my thesis work about user interfaces for display-based systems with multiple threads or processes under one's control.
If ever there was a demo of how processors have developed this would have to be it, a PDP11 running on a single chip! quite incredible and superbly presented.
I have the piDP-8 and 11. I will get the 10 one day when I figure out where I have some space for it. The 8 and 11 are great pieces of hardware. I have been playing with the 8 a lot lately, it’s a fun computer to explore, paired with my Callisto - 2 3d printed retro terminal.
Wow, those front panels really take me back, though I admit my PDP days were mostly spent staring into a VT-52 screen at a VENIX getty. I gather that VENIX eventually because an x86 port with a lot of bells and whistles from Berkeley, but the version we had was more like a raw System III.
Steve Russell was not an MIT student, he was working for John McCarthy. As a part of the MIT Community, he joined the Tech Model Railroad Club and the rest is history!
Marc, another university system had its own multi-user graphical system around the same time, by the name PLATO, including a very popular and influential game called _Avatar_ . Would love to see you take a look at some of that!
We have many PDP computers in operstion at our museum..just recently aquired a "dekstop" pdp-8 s/n 13 this thing weighs over 200# We have the only running PDP-9 in the country. We demonstrated this machime to Oscar when he visited with us. Give me an IBM mainframe anyday
@0:44 - If you want to get familiar with metric measurements and metric hardware, get a couple of 3D printers and start tinkering with them. That will get you immersed REAL quick.
I need to wire up those emulators to my PDP10 front panel (I have a real one here as well as the 11/70 panel) Spent a lot of time on TOPS-20 back at college. If it didn't have 36 bits, you weren't playing with a full DEC
@@larsbrinkhoff Unfortunately, I don't see the serial on the front panel (I don't have the back sheet metal cover). I never saw the full system; the guys at Eli Heffron used to save the front panels for me from machines they scrapped. Many years ago, I had wired it up to a blinkenlights circuit (multiple channels of 555/7493/7447); hopefully it won't be too hard to undo. I know it is missing the connectors for the LED board but the button side should be intact.
@@larsbrinkhoff If you'd asked that question 30 years ago I could have supplied a good many of the serial numbers of LCG systems in the UK as much of the unofficial communication between system admin teams went through my office as my boss was the DECUS UK 10/20 SIG Chairman; however the only two I can now recall are 695 (KI10 - University of Leeds) and 2281 (2050/60/65 - Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham). Don't think that I ever knew the serials of the On-Line Systems (OLS) imported KI-10s in Epsom I worked on as they'd been hacked to report the same serial as all other OLS systems (1974 - which I think was OLS's first KL-10 in Pittsburgh). Can't recall the serials of the three KL-10s (2060s) I ran at ICI Wilton, nor the other three KL-10 across the group (1x1099 and another 2060) nor the two KS10s (decommissioned by the time I joined the company). PS: I do have a KI-10 control panel in my garage (ex-ADP, ex-University of Pittsbugh(?)).
Foonly was a computer company founded in 1976 by Dave Poole that produced a series of DEC PDP-10 compatible mainframe computers, including the Foonly F1, F2, F4, and F5. Tymshare was a computer services company founded in 1964 which marketed and sold Foonly's line of computers. While Foonly designed and manufactured the hardware, Tymshare acted as a reseller and service provider for Foonly's PDP-10 compatible computer line in the late 1970s and early 1980s under the "Tymshare XX" brand name. Tymshare also offered on-line services based on DEC PDP-10s.
@@capability-snob I worked for many years at Tymnet, the packet network company run by Tymshare. We created everything for the network, hardware and software, building a global public data network in the process while also selling private networks to businesses. Was quite a ride.
The F1 was also used to render the CGI frames for TRON - one at a time, and directly exposed to film. They didn't have enough digital storage to keep the frames, so once the image was exposed, the digital version was gone.
I cut my programming teeth on an 11/40 in 1975 (Yes I have an 8 and 11 kit on my wall) Only the advanced maths students had access to the schools computer, however I had befriended the Computer Teacher who let me on the machine afterhours. My maths was not that good however I believed that computers in the future were not 'ivory tower' machines doing higher maths.. but machines capable of sorting string informations, printing invoices etc, What we nowadays mostly use the comuters for :) I have do many fond memories of working on the machine.. debating the furture of computing with the maths students.. and actually getting my first programming job in 78. Now at 64, I have retired after a lifetime of working on mini's and PCs - doing things in my early years that were considered 'impossible' , and always being happy straddling hardware and software instead of 'speciaizing' Some of my creations were a natural language processor and self modifying code on a TRS-80, file locking and record sharing on a shared hard drive (no - no network or TCP stack), and military stuff I cannot talk about :(
I have a SIMH PDP10 permanently running on my RasPBX asterisk hooked up to my ATA phones. Oh, I also installed CUPS so it is my print server too. It's an ancient Raspberry Pi 2 and only ever averages 5% CPU use for all these tasks. When it comes to telnet or SSH into the RasPBX, I have to use "cool-retro-term &" it has to be said. An absolute must install if you are running WSL2 on Windows and have a powerful enough graphics card to emulate an ancient CRT.
21:08 Ah SHRDLU, good times - the famous "because you told me to"! The reason SHRDLU/ETAOIN was a thing on Linotype was for typos - you can't really backspace molten lead so you needed something obvious to cut out before you set the type (not that this always happened!)
Somehow these machines manage to look old-fashioned and futuristic at the same time, which is really a testament to good design. Either way they're beautiful machines. Modern computer designers have a lot to answer for! At least nowadays you can get colourful keycaps thanks to keyboard enthusiasts, but the fact that pretty much everything else is either silver, black or grey is really a travesty. Sure, there's the odd gaming laptop with an RGB backlit keyboard or light strip, and obviously the current iMac is colourful. And yes, you can build a custom RGB lit PC, but you don't walk into your local big box retailer and see any other options.
Time index 20:28, the MCP chess program. With modifications to the code, could you implement and play the 3D chess version as seen in the Spock Testing Sequence of Star Trek IV:The Voyage Home? The graphics look similar. The program is also reminiscent of the games available on Project:Joshua (WOPR) in WarGames 1983.
Yes, it's called 11SIM. It was used by the Logo group for developing their language. The emulator supports displaying turtle graphics. Indeed when it was started in 1972 or so, there wouldn't have been many PDP-11s at MIT. I heard their 11/45 was one of the first out of DEC.
@@larsbrinkhoff Also, if I understand correctly, the simh simulator suite for all the vintage DEC machines had its origin on a PDP-8 emulator for the PDP-10, a program called MIMIC from Bob Supnik himself. Making simh a piece of computer history in/of itself...
I have a PiDP-10 - and it's a blast from both hardware and software perspectives. One can run ITS (Incompatible Timeshare System), but also TOPS-10 and TOPS-20 OS's. BTW: I didn't restore the PDP-1 by my self - I was a member of the original RESTORATION TEAM that did the restoration.
Thanks Lyle, great insights in the vid, fantastic that you pushed all this stuff along. I also like Marc's enthusiasm! Oscar, you've found your 'tribe' of old computer nuts!
Spent countless hours programming on a DEC-20, then converting all of those programs to run on a VAX Cluster.
@@James_Bowie I have t-shirt for you. It says something about a "full DEC".
@@larsbrinkhoff or perhaps NOT having a full DEC? lol
The keyboard on a Linotype typesetting machine was arranged according to letter frequency, in columns from left to right. The first two columns read ETAOIN SHRDLU. If the typesetter (the human) made a typo, there was no backspace or undo, so they would 'run out' the current piece of hot metal type being cast by the machine by running their fingers down the first two or three columns of keys. It's a type of filler text (like Lorem Ipsum) that's been showing up in various places in popular culture since at least the 1920s. 😻
These old machines had such beautiful designs. Someone must have put a lot of thought into them.
Yes, they were really beautiful. I have worked with real 8i's and the KA-10. What a machine that was. Never did work with an 11/70. I always thought the KA-10 panel was the most amazing looking.
I think a lot of the people who designed them loved science fiction when they were growing up, and tried to make them look like something that would appear in a science fiction movie.
When you think of it, the flashing lights were in a sense just pixels in a very low resolution video display.
We don't need flashing lights anymore because we can easily get a video monitor with tens of millions of "flashing lights" for a couple hundred dollars.
The thing that's missing in video displays is the lovely "analog" effect that the incandescent lights exhibited when displaying very high speed "ones" and "zeros." The speed could easily be so high that the lights glowed with brightness intermediate to "full on" and "full off." This created a beguiling degree of complexity and nuance in the appearance of the display.
The machines of that time were romantic, in a sense. They revealed their inner details to a much greater, more immediate extent than today's computers do. Of course, they operated at one thousandth the speed, and the amount of memory they had available was more like one millionth of what we routinely have access to now.
Very nice reproductions though.
@@Obladgolated the goal of the blinkenlights was to be able to monitor what the machine was doing in real time, but by the 70s the machines were already so fast that the light display wasn't of much use, since all the lights ended up flickering at high speed at the same time until something went wrong. It's not so much that we don't need the lights anymore, it's more that computers are now so fast and complicated that there's no way to display anything useful that way, so it's more practical to use the more complex monitoring and analysis tools that came about with graphics displays
@@thesteelrodent1796 You missed my point. Yes the machines were faster than the lights could respond, but you could still use them to debug loops and other repetitive structures by watching the way they changed brightness, as different patterns of instructions caused characteristic sequences of addresses to be decoded, and in the case of PDP machines, the major state generator to spend more time in this state or that state as you developed your code and added more functions. These characteristic sequences were revealed by changes in brightness of the lights, which integrated their duty cycle by thermal inertia, at least before DEC went to LEDs in 1974 or 1975.
@@Obladgolated Don't know about all that. For today flashing lights would just always be on. The machines back then ran in the Mhz or maybe even Khz range. These were very early computers and basic. So you often needed a way to get a program initially loaded. Switches and lights were a cheap way. Heck, even the 8i had the RIM loader printed on the front panel. Remember these were being sold to schools and small companies initially.
And I feel people were more proud to show their design skills then. They wanted something that looked good and also functioned. DEC was the leader with these small "computers" at first. There were no ROMs or the like to start the computer from scratch. Whatever the reason I am glad they had blinkenlights computers.
Back in the day, I wrote a lot of PDP-10 assembly code used to control 90 foot tall robots in automated warehouse systems for a company called Eaton Kenway. Also programmed PDP-11 with Fortran and IBM Series/1 running EDX (Event Driven Executive) OS and programing with EDL (Event Driven Language), an interpreted language (these might be something you don't yet know about, Marc). All in the late 70s to early 80s. And all for Eaton Kenway.
Thanks for yet another stroll down memory lane.
That sounds really interesting. Never did any assembly on the 10. Plenty on the 8 and 11.
My dad tells a story about how he was working with researchers in a hospital. They put through an order for a PDP-11 computer and it was declined, so they sent through a new order for a programmed data processor and were able to get it across the line 😅 2:12
This is so beautiful! I've dropped an xmas gift hint with a friend.
My first post-school job, in 1974, was primary operator of the KA10 at WPI. Soon after, I wrote a replacement for systat and the queue manager, which got me into the system programming group :) 50 years later, I still remember a lot of the tops-10 assembly language, and even a bit of teco.
In 1999 my employer of the time was dumping their PDP/11 machines because they weren't Y2K compliant. The whole PDP/11 at our site, complete with tape drive and RL02 disk drives was heading for the skip. However a collector emailed me, he had hoped to get the PDP/11 from another site of the same employer but they had dumped it already. I dismantled the PDP/11 and got it onto a company van to send to him, and he got it running again. Alas the tape drive and RL02 drives (fully working and some with recent bearings having been fitted) ended up the in skip.
Sometimes I think we love those machines for the same reasons that kids love dinosaurs: a) They are long extinct, so they have this alien feel to it. b) it's fun to spot features that survived evolution, and others that have gone extict with them. EMACS on the PDP-10!! No passwords on ITS!! c) the thought "how was it possible for those creatures to once rule the world with THOSE kind of brains?"
I have two PiDP-8is, one PiDP-11 (running 2.11BSD and crunching some seismic data every night) an now one PiDP-10 (ITS). Great kits, high quality, lots of software to go with it.
True, but many of us used these actual machines. Dinosaurs we did not interact with. But I still love dinosaurs. My brother and I used to play with plastic dinosaurs as kids.
I have built BOTH of Oscar's PDP/8 and 11. It was great fun, and it inspired me to create an HP21MX (HP1000/HP2100 etc..) emulator. It runs SIMH as well, and is Raspberry Pi based, in a full size panel.
I would be happy to share information for anybody who is interested.
Well Done Oscar et al !!!
Yes please!
Hi Marc! I saw you had a picture of KI-587 there for a second. we had LOTS of fun restoring it for the LCM. There was plenty of fun restoring the KA, and the CDC-6500 we had too. Thanks for tweaking my memories! Nothing beats the time I had at LCM. Bruce Sherry, former Principal Engineer at LCM.
You were living in vintage computer restorer's paradise. Amazing job the team did back there!
This is so strange! Today I went to the Science Museum in London to see Tim Hunkin's exhibition one last time, and saw a PDP-10 in another exhibit. I get home and enjoy your video on it!! Those switches look amazing,
I'm going to the museum tomorrow, hoping to see the Tim Hunkin exhibit.
Marc, I have to say, that your channel is a wonder. Knowing what you have behind you in terms of accomplishments, you could be owning a small tropical island and not care the least bit for the world. Instead, you are giving back so much to the community, with an awesome team, I can't even...
I love your work, your videos and you are actually someone to look up to.
Thank you for sharing this demo and interview! It's incredible how much love and dedication goes into these reconstruction projects!
I forget who introduced me to these, but I've always loved this era of computing. So tactile and visual and just plain computery.
What a thoroughly nice group of people! Excellent video too.
This brings back memories. I worked in a neuroscience lab in 1980 with grad students digitizing rat brain slices by hand from a microscope with X-Y LVDTs on the stage which could be read by A/D. The Z axis was controlled using a stepper motor to move the focal point up and down within a brain slice.
The heart of the system was a PDP-11/34 running RT-11. Peripherals were two 8 inch floppies, two RL-02 hard drives, LA-36 console, Hazeltine 1552 VDT, and a DEC VR17 vector display. I don’t recall the number of the board generating the vectors; it may have been an M7013. We wrote assembly routines we could call in FORTRAN to generate vector images. I am thinking it was probably M7013 because it could run the same Lunar Lander game as a DEC GT40. Lunar Lander was a lab favorite. If you went to the right lunar up location, there was a McDonald’s and an astronaut would get out of the LEM and order a Big Mac.
That PiDP-10 is b-e-a-utiful
Must say I really fancy a PiDP-8 - I worked for DEC in UK from mid 80s to mid 00s - started as PDP-11 support engineer and 'progressed' to PDP-8s after a couple of years.
The PDP-8 team was small and proud - those old babies needed a lot of love and care, especially the DECtapes and paper tape readers! Now where is my can of WD40?
I know we had a couple of customers with PDP-10s still in the 80s, but I was never lucky enough to see one in the flesh - only via a modem on a VT52, or maybe a VT220 😂
Wonderful video - thanks Marc and team - really enjoyed it!
Seeing a KA-10 in person and working with it was a joy. My favorite DEC machine by far. Even though I started with the 8's in high school.
I've built a PiDP-11 and am incredibly impressed by what Oscar has created. I need a PiDP-10, but I also need somewhere to put it....
They're not kidding about how "security" was handled on ITS - in "later years" (1985ish) it was common for curious undergrads to log in as RMS (no password - there were some things like connecting to other systems that required you be logged in as *somebody*, they just weren't picky about who), and then someone would message you and ask you to please create an account with your own name on it if you were going to actually use the system and not just be a tourist. Sort of "onboarding via honeypot" :-)
Outstanding! Amalgamating the Raspberry Pi into a PDP 10 is genius. The PDP 10 was the first computer I ever used in 1970, My school had a dial up TTY33 to Hatfield Polytechnic which was part of a project that affected and educated thousands of people and the Pi my favourite computer now which has touched and educated millions.
Got 'em all ! plus Dave McNaught's astonishing IMSAI 8080 replica
I have the pidp8 for many years now, it's a decorative piece in my living room. Happily running blinkenlights for many years now without fail.
I have an 8 and 11 on my office wall. People who visit are mesmerised at them, even better when I challange them to Space Wars on the 8... including the emulator for the original round screen.
The announcing of the culprit who crashed the system to all reminded me of what would happen to anyone who broke the mac rom build - newspapers all over the floor of your cubicle because you were a "bad dog". It happened to me. Once. It was the nineties.
The PDP-1 was the highlight of my visit at the CHM back in 2018.
Must say, best video of all time. I mean, thank you for sharing and wow, it's crazy. I wonder how in 50 years from now, will someone do demos about nowadays systems. History is about to repeat itself. And second of all, wonder if the MIT spirit from that era is still alike today.
This is an amazing work of art! I checked the link, and I was shocked at how low of a price he is asking for these----sharing the love of these systems is obviously much more important to him that making the most profit he can. I'm truly impressed!
Oscar agonized a great deal about the price, figuring out how to keep it as low as possible. He truly has a passion for putting computer history in the hands of ordinary people.
The late 1960s price for the KA10 CPU (what the PiDP-10 emulates) was $160,000. A 16kW (36 bit word + parity) was around $35K. (About the price of a house.) Hmm, maybe more - a dollar a byte was a good price for PDP-11 core.
I was fortunate to meet Oscar at VCF East some years ago when he was just completing his remarkable pi PDP-8. I bought his original model before the switches were updated. I may just have to buy another, the accurate switches are amazing.
BEAUTIFUL design and even a piece of art!
I learned BASIC on a DEC PDP 11/70 in high school. The computer lab consisted of a DECwriter and an acoustic coupler modem. I spent many hours after school playing Adventure.
You guys are "Bloody" brilliant. Many thanks team very enjoyable.
Hello Oscar,
The new PiDP-10 looks just amazing, like it's brothers. You do such great work on these, the detailing is wonderful. Maybe some day I can justify owning one..
Just sent out two more of your nifty Kim UNO kits this morning. There is still interest out there, people seem to really like them.
Hope you are well,
Bill in St Paul
Oscar is a really great guy. I worked a bunch with the Kim-Uno years back, and made my own variant of it, using two different keyboards and a common cathode vrs anode display. He was really great with discussing changes to the emulation firmware and such. I'm really glad to see him making an appearance here! :D
I fell in love with a PDP-11/44 when I was in high school during the first half of the '80s. Then I studied computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University during the second half of the '80s, where I used DECSYSTEM-20s. I also got to see the Computer Science Department's PDP-10.
I have one of Oscar's PiDP-11/70 kits, and I recently received a PiDP-8 kit. (I still need to assemble both of them...)
I can't wait to order a PiDP-10 when Oscar and friends begin accepting orders again!
😎👍❤️
Thank you. A walk down memory lane. As a student I used a PDP-8S, and know that front panel very well - having memorised the boot loader sequence.
Me too, I remember people hanging around outside the door to the computer room waiting for someone else to enter the boot loader :)
My final year project was an AI that played Monopoly, I wrote it initially in Algol and translated it to PDP-8 assembler. My friend got a better mark for his project: an implementation of the trivial game of noughts & crosses (tic-tac-toe) mainly because it used the Direct View Storage Tube (a primitive graphics terminal) to draw the game - and I was the one that wrote that bit :(
And my venture into "computer music" - a program that was a simple loop whose length was determined by the setting of the panel switches to generate different frequencies. I then had an AM radio tuned off channel next to the PDP-8 which picked up the EMI emitted by the computer and played the note. I can't remember now if I took it to the next step of storing a tune as data, I suspect my initial tests showed there wasn't a lot of promise!
@@TonyWhitley I had to program it in Assembler, self-modifying code and all that. I was a Ph.D. student at the time and used a PDP-8S cast off by the high energy physics dept to read in paper tape, translate to a different format and punch out paper tape that could be read by the university computer. Them paper tape readers and punches were something else!
In my first job (1980) I was handed a project "we were waiting for somebody with PDP-8 assembler" to modify the control system for the bright beer bottling section of the Carlsberg brewery in Northampton. 12 KW of memory running about 100 parallel tasks and controlling as many valves and motors. It's amazing what you can do in assembler if you really have to.
I had some happy days in the late 80s working on PDP-11/73 for V.G. (Vacuum Generators) Scientific who made surface science instruments i.e. microscopes of varying types. Mainly in Pascal if I remember correctly. Lots of fun developing code with overlays and remapping of the 8th address page register and so on :)
Can't wait to assemble mine! It will join it's siblings the PiDP-11 and PiDP-8!
What a memory! Playing these games on a mainframe back in the day. We thought it was the coolest thing ever- and so many changes came afterward!
I confess that all of this was new to me except Shrdlu - I have fond memories of running a BASIC version of that (and many other AI programs) on my Amstrad CPC6128 in the 1980s!
Thank you so much for this video, which is both interesting and informative. I have only built a PiDP8/I so far, but am inspired by all the work being done on the other models. Looking forward to reliving the years I spent on PDP11s.
I attended York university '82-'84. They had a linked KL-10 and KS-10, both running TOPS-10. It was the University's main computing resource, doing document formatting for the historians, statistics for the sociologists, SPICE simulations (in overnight batch mode) for the electronic engineers, and so on.
Fortunately, in my 2nd and 3rd years we used VAX11/780 running Unix.
Wow, they are beautiful Mr. V.!!! Spacecraft grade retro classic..:::🌞💚🐾
wow thats awesome, thanks for showing us the demo!
Mind Blown! PDP-10 - at the time, a super computer... *emulated* on a Raspberry Pi 58-years later! Think what Frontier will be emulated on.. in 2082.
Those are so beautiful 😍
The Raspberry Pi has been one of the twenty-first century's best ideas.
Especially when combined with the emulator “SIMH” ✅
I went to a mit reunion with my dad last year and talked to guys that knew the founders of Dec from mit. Apparently part of what brought them together was a model railroad club that had a coke machine that would attract students…
“Tech Model Railroad Club”, been their many times in the distant past, it was in an old building leftover from WW2, that has since been demolished and of course a new building replaced it.. yes, the coke machine could vend on a computer input 👍
@@mwolrich I went by their location on 265 Massachusetts Avenue a few weeks ago. The railroad was in there, but otherwise it looked quite empty and abandoned. The Tetris game worked though.
Regarding "shrdlu": My Dad was in the Signal Corp in WWII. He told me that radio teletype operators would reply "Repeat after etaoin shrdlu." after receiving garbled text. Of course, this was an inside joke as the sender would have no idea idea where to begin resending. Years later I learned the connection this string has with the Linotype machine.
I am still assembling my PiDP-10. My PiDP-8 runs TSS/8 as that was the machine I learned computers on and the OS that we used. My 11 currently has no Rasp Pi to run it so it's on the shelf in the closet. Can't wait to see my 10 run. I worked with a real KA-10 so this will be fun.
I too have experienced the KA10
Back in 2000 I encountered a PDP11/44 still in use, running a pre-press RIP for a modern laser imagesetter. There was just 1 guy in NZ who could still maintain the system!
I once owned a pdp 11/94 as a teenager, saved it from the shredder. Boy, do i regret selling it!
This brings back soooo many memories.
I thought this was going to be a boring video... sorry... but HEEELLLLL no it's not! Well worth the watch. Thank you again.
The first two columns on a Linotype keyboard are "etaoin" and "shrdlu", which are roughly in the order of the letter frequency in English.
He is the PDP legend.
Marc. I am the guy who reverse engineered decwar. The first multiplayer online designed on a decsystem-10.
Let me know if you would like to take a look.
Think you meant "reverse" over "reserve". But no problem. We know what you meant. I never played Decwar. Is that like Operator wars on the 10? Never played that either, but I have heard of both.
@@timradde4328 Yes, sorry.
from Colossus, World Control :D
@@Drforbin941 No need to apologize. I make lots of transposition errors on here while typing.
Running one of Oscars PDP-11 front panels. Running RSX-11M. Looks nice in my office.
Looks just like the PDP-11/70 I programmed on in the 1970's.
Really cool. The PDP-1 demo with that radar tube is what inspired me to build my ads-b radar scope that runs on a raspi. It takes live ads-b data from an SDR dongle and displays it on a 5 inch P7 phosphor radar tube. I also wrote some other programs for it such as munching squares since it's not much more than an XY scope interfaced to the raspi with a pair of 2-channel DACs.
I have such a tube, but nothing to drive it. If you could help me with that, I'd be very grateful. I'd like to have it run Spacewar and SHRDLU in style.
@@larsbrinkhoff The deflection circuit and coils I used are pretty terrible and non-linear. It also doesn't focus well. My project made it to hackaday a while ago: /2023/04/15/real-radar-scope-crt-shows-flights-using-ads-b/
If it's just the bare tube then getting a power supply for it should be your first priority. That's where I started anyways. I made my own flyback transformer by resin 3D printing a spool that would fit a core that I recycled from another failed flyback transformer I got from my TDS784 scope. I can give you the design, but it might not fit just any old flyback transformer core.
@@larsbrinkhoff Keep in mind, I had to re-wind my flyback HV coil multiple times because it kept arcing over. Don't be like me initially. I ended up insulating the inside of the spool with some kapton tape and RTV, then insulate and wrap every 40-100 winds with more kapton tape and RTV. (They call it 'kaptop' tape because it kapt'-it-on).
Also a good idea to leave a few extra taps on your other lower voltage winds including the 6.3v heater wind so that you can more easily change things later without re-winding or scrapping your painstakingly wound transformer.
Took me back to when I first started work, in 1986. There was a PDP 11/70 sitting in a back room. We were a short step ahead in what was actually in use - we ran a VAX 11/784 (or 785, I forget) cluster.
I have already built the PiDP-11 .. must .. resist ..
Give it up. You can't resist forever. :) You need an 8 and a 10. NEED.
Resistance is futile
@@Hans-gb4mv It is indeed. I have all 3.
If I buy this (them) I'm going to tell my wife it's all your guys fault!
Great work
I bought already the pdp8 some time ago , now I have to place the pdp 10 onto my near wishlist ... great work ... also the pdp 11 is on my wishlist ... UPDATE: just preordered the Pdp10 version.
Did my thesis using Stanford AI's PDP-6/10 combination. Great memories. Last machine I was able to program and debug at the machine language level. We used to replace the default null job with a one dimensional version of Pong, that ran in the front panel lights. ITS's top level control was a debugging system which, with some other early work, motivated much of my thesis work about user interfaces for display-based systems with multiple threads or processes under one's control.
WAITS is also available for running on the PiDP-10, or a plain PDP-10 emulator.
If ever there was a demo of how processors have developed this would have to be it, a PDP11 running on a single chip! quite incredible and superbly presented.
The pdp10 console is great. I have in my barn a working SC40 a pdp10 clone but no flashing lights.
Now that must be cool to have one of those. Never seen one.
I have the piDP-8 and 11. I will get the 10 one day when I figure out where I have some space for it. The 8 and 11 are great pieces of hardware.
I have been playing with the 8 a lot lately, it’s a fun computer to explore, paired with my Callisto - 2 3d printed retro terminal.
PDP-10KA Ran E a text editor for writing reports etc. in the 1970s. Amazing.
21:00 "Don't call me Shrdlu"
"Surely"
Wow, those front panels really take me back, though I admit my PDP days were mostly spent staring into a VT-52 screen at a VENIX getty. I gather that VENIX eventually because an x86 port with a lot of bells and whistles from Berkeley, but the version we had was more like a raw System III.
Ohhh... I'll have to add a PiDP-10 to the collection too. (The 8 & 11 were right behind me blinking away when this video dropped.)
Steve Russell was not an MIT student, he was working for John McCarthy. As a part of the MIT Community, he joined the Tech Model Railroad Club and the rest is history!
Marc, another university system had its own multi-user graphical system around the same time, by the name PLATO, including a very popular and influential game called _Avatar_ .
Would love to see you take a look at some of that!
Imagine having the whole lab's hardware in scale replica... that would be a lot of fun.
I don't know which of these looks best. The 8, 10 or 11.
We have many PDP computers in operstion at our museum..just recently aquired a "dekstop" pdp-8 s/n 13 this thing weighs over 200#
We have the only running PDP-9 in the country. We demonstrated this machime to Oscar when he visited with us.
Give me an IBM mainframe anyday
I have the PIDP8 and Pidp11. Will get the 10 soon.
Love them.Like many I cant have the real thing so this is the nearest I will get.
Cool. I worked for Microsoft founder Paul Allen i the late 1990's and he got a "Toad" replica of a PDP and even made it available on Internet
Not only was DEC a Fortune 500 company, but in its heyday the PDP-11 business alone was large enough to be a Fortune 500 company in its own right.
@0:44 - If you want to get familiar with metric measurements and metric hardware, get a couple of 3D printers and start tinkering with them. That will get you immersed REAL quick.
Pretty Darned Pretty!
I need to wire up those emulators to my PDP10 front panel (I have a real one here as well as the 11/70 panel) Spent a lot of time on TOPS-20 back at college. If it didn't have 36 bits, you weren't playing with a full DEC
Do you remember the serial number of that PDP-10? We're trying to build a list of all known serial numbers.
@@larsbrinkhoff Unfortunately, I don't see the serial on the front panel (I don't have the back sheet metal cover). I never saw the full system; the guys at Eli Heffron used to save the front panels for me from machines they scrapped. Many years ago, I had wired it up to a blinkenlights circuit (multiple channels of 555/7493/7447); hopefully it won't be too hard to undo. I know it is missing the connectors for the LED board but the button side should be intact.
@@michaelardai9703I would love to hear from you if you manage to move it over to the emulator. Good luck!
@@larsbrinkhoff If you'd asked that question 30 years ago I could have supplied a good many of the serial numbers of LCG systems in the UK as much of the unofficial communication between system admin teams went through my office as my boss was the DECUS UK 10/20 SIG Chairman; however the only two I can now recall are 695 (KI10 - University of Leeds) and 2281 (2050/60/65 - Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham). Don't think that I ever knew the serials of the On-Line Systems (OLS) imported KI-10s in Epsom I worked on as they'd been hacked to report the same serial as all other OLS systems (1974 - which I think was OLS's first KL-10 in Pittsburgh). Can't recall the serials of the three KL-10s (2060s) I ran at ICI Wilton, nor the other three KL-10 across the group (1x1099 and another 2060) nor the two KS10s (decommissioned by the time I joined the company).
PS: I do have a KI-10 control panel in my garage (ex-ADP, ex-University of Pittsbugh(?)).
Amazing!
Foonly was a computer company founded in 1976 by Dave Poole that produced a series of DEC PDP-10 compatible mainframe computers, including the Foonly F1, F2, F4, and F5. Tymshare was a computer services company founded in 1964 which marketed and sold Foonly's line of computers. While Foonly designed and manufactured the hardware, Tymshare acted as a reseller and service provider for Foonly's PDP-10 compatible computer line in the late 1970s and early 1980s under the "Tymshare XX" brand name. Tymshare also offered on-line services based on DEC PDP-10s.
Tymshare were pioneers on so many fronts, nice to see they were in this space too! I really need to go buy that book...
@@capability-snob I worked for many years at Tymnet, the packet network company run by Tymshare. We created everything for the network, hardware and software, building a global public data network in the process while also selling private networks to businesses. Was quite a ride.
The F1 was also used to render the CGI frames for TRON - one at a time, and directly exposed to film. They didn't have enough digital storage to keep the frames, so once the image was exposed, the digital version was gone.
wtf !
no words
speechless
xxxxxxxxxx
Amazing.
Oscar is my new favourite mad scientist/engineer.
Sweet!
I would buy the cases n switches for electronic projects
Such a elegant design n look
the pdp 11 was used to program atari 6502 assembly and 2600 games
So cool. I have no use for one, but I want it!
Marc,
Way Cool!!!
Stan
I cut my programming teeth on an 11/40 in 1975 (Yes I have an 8 and 11 kit on my wall) Only the advanced maths students had access to the schools computer, however I had befriended the Computer Teacher who let me on the machine afterhours. My maths was not that good however I believed that computers in the future were not 'ivory tower' machines doing higher maths.. but machines capable of sorting string informations, printing invoices etc, What we nowadays mostly use the comuters for :)
I have do many fond memories of working on the machine.. debating the furture of computing with the maths students.. and actually getting my first programming job in 78.
Now at 64, I have retired after a lifetime of working on mini's and PCs - doing things in my early years that were considered 'impossible' , and always being happy straddling hardware and software instead of 'speciaizing'
Some of my creations were a natural language processor and self modifying code on a TRS-80, file locking and record sharing on a shared hard drive (no - no network or TCP stack), and military stuff I cannot talk about :(
I have a SIMH PDP10 permanently running on my RasPBX asterisk hooked up to my ATA phones. Oh, I also installed CUPS so it is my print server too. It's an ancient Raspberry Pi 2 and only ever averages 5% CPU use for all these tasks.
When it comes to telnet or SSH into the RasPBX, I have to use "cool-retro-term &" it has to be said. An absolute must install if you are running WSL2 on Windows and have a powerful enough graphics card to emulate an ancient CRT.
Thank God that guy’s wife didn’t want a full sized PDP in their house!!!
And what could be wrong with that? I had a full sized 8i in my house. Then again by that time I was divorced. :) 4 full racks.
21:08 Ah SHRDLU, good times - the famous "because you told me to"! The reason SHRDLU/ETAOIN was a thing on Linotype was for typos - you can't really backspace molten lead so you needed something obvious to cut out before you set the type (not that this always happened!)
Somehow these machines manage to look old-fashioned and futuristic at the same time, which is really a testament to good design. Either way they're beautiful machines. Modern computer designers have a lot to answer for! At least nowadays you can get colourful keycaps thanks to keyboard enthusiasts, but the fact that pretty much everything else is either silver, black or grey is really a travesty. Sure, there's the odd gaming laptop with an RGB backlit keyboard or light strip, and obviously the current iMac is colourful. And yes, you can build a custom RGB lit PC, but you don't walk into your local big box retailer and see any other options.
Time index 20:28, the MCP chess program. With modifications to the code, could you implement and play the 3D chess version as seen in the Spock Testing Sequence of Star Trek IV:The Voyage Home? The graphics look similar. The program is also reminiscent of the games available on Project:Joshua (WOPR) in WarGames 1983.
Left and right audio channels are switched in some scenes. (?)
Am i the only one thorougly impressed by the ai demo??? How the hell did they do that baxk then????
I recently read that there was a PDP-11 emulator written for the PDP-10 which runs in ITS. I guess there weren't enough PDP-11s at MIT already.
Yes, it's called 11SIM. It was used by the Logo group for developing their language. The emulator supports displaying turtle graphics. Indeed when it was started in 1972 or so, there wouldn't have been many PDP-11s at MIT. I heard their 11/45 was one of the first out of DEC.
@@larsbrinkhoff Also, if I understand correctly, the simh simulator suite for all the vintage DEC machines had its origin on a PDP-8 emulator for the PDP-10, a program called MIMIC from Bob Supnik himself. Making simh a piece of computer history in/of itself...