Article: 17863 of alt.sys.pdp10 Path: iad-read.news.verio.net!dfw-artgen!iad-peer.news.verio.net!news.verio.net!news.tele.dk!small.news.tele.dk!130.133.1.3!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!junk.nocrew.ORG!not-for-mail From: Lars Brinkhoff Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: FAQ questions? Date: 27 Sep 2002 08:10:21 +0200 Organization: nocrew Lines: 31 Sender: lars@junk.nocrew.org Message-ID: <853crw0xpu.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> References: <05c7pugvjsd94ujbnfr1a9b19vfvda54mv@4ax.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: junk.nocrew.org (213.242.147.30) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: fu-berlin.de 1033107314 10665769 213.242.147.30 (16 [140306]) X-Orig-Path: junk.nocrew.org!not-for-mail User-Agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) Emacs/20.7 Xref: dfw-artgen alt.sys.pdp10:17863 My suggested answers. I'm not sure if everything's correct. Billy Joe writes: > What is a PDP-10? The PDP-10 architecture is a family of 36-bit word-addressed machines. They were manufactured primarily by DEC from 1964 to 1988, but the line was cancelled in 1983 in favour of the VAX family. Clones have been made by Xerox PARC, Foonly, Tymshare, Systems Concepts, XKL. Famous software running on PDP-10s include: EMACS (the first visual text editor), ITS, TENEX, TECO, SPELL (the first spell checker), ADVENT (the first? text adventure game), Zork, Dungeon?, and MacLisp. A memory word is 36 bits long, which is also the length of the general-purpose registers. All user instructions are 36 bits and have 9 bits to specify an operation, 4 bits to specify a register, 1 bit to indicate indirect addressing, 4 bits to specify an index register, and 18 bits to specify an address, offset, or immediate value. The first version of the architecture was limited to a virtual address space of 256K words; a later version extended this to a maximum of 1G words. > What operating systems ran on it? TOPS-10 and TOPS-20 by DEC. TENEX by BBN. ITS by MIT hackers. WAITS by Stanford hackers, developed from an early version of TOPS-10. FOONEX, Foonly's version of TENEX. TYMCOM-X, Tymshare's version of TOPS-10 or TOPS-20. -- Lars Brinkhoff http://lars.nocrew.org/ Linux, GCC, PDP-10, Brinkhoff Consulting http://www.brinkhoff.se/ HTTP programming Article: 17872 of alt.sys.pdp10 Path: iad-read.news.verio.net!dfw-artgen!iad-peer.news.verio.net!news.verio.net!newsfeed.cwix.com!logbridge.uoregon.edu!news.u.washington.edu!140.142.17.34.MISMATCH!news.u.washington.edu!shiva0.cac.washington.edu!mrc From: Mark Crispin Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: FAQ questions? Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2002 07:33:37 -0700 Organization: Networks and Distributed Computing Lines: 24 Message-ID: References: <05c7pugvjsd94ujbnfr1a9b19vfvda54mv@4ax.com> <853crw0xpu.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: shiva0.cac.washington.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Trace: nntp1.u.washington.edu 1033137219 14054 (None) 140.142.17.35 X-Complaints-To: help@cac.washington.edu In-Reply-To: <853crw0xpu.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Content-Length: 314159 (believe this at your own risk) Xref: dfw-artgen alt.sys.pdp10:17872 On Thu, 27 Sep 2002, Lars Brinkhoff wrote: > Famous software running on PDP-10s include: EMACS (the first visual > text editor), ITS, TENEX, TECO, SPELL (the first spell checker), > ADVENT (the first? text adventure game), Zork, Dungeon?, and MacLisp. I don't think that you need the "?" after "first". I don't know what "Dungeon" was as distinct from Zork, but there were certainly other dungeon-type games such as Haunt. Other notable software off the top of my head: SUDS (Stanford University Drawing System -- considered by some people to be the finest circuit drawing software of all time), MACSYMA, MacHack (Richard Greenblatt's chess-playing program, one of the first), TECH2 (another early chess program), the first IMAP server, the first KERMIT program (the "K" in KERMIT stood for KL10). The interest in PDP-10s goes beyond mere "retro-computing"; SUDS is still in production use with no obvious replacement. -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.