Joe Smith's PDP-10 page (original) (raw)

PDP-10 index

This is the 3,597th access to this page.

36 bits forever!

Tymshare / Tymnet pictures

This is one of the two pages at Best.com that describe the history of 36-bit computing: www.inwap.com/pdp10 = www.best.com/\~inwap/pdp10/. The other one, www.multicians.orgis Tom Van Vleck's history of Multics. Both of these computers use 36-bit words with 18-bit addresses, but otherwise have very little in common. (Another set of web pages dedicated to 36-bit computers is at www.36bit.org/ .)

This page was listed in the NCSA Mosaic What's New page for June 16, 1995.

36 bit systems running today

25-Nov-96: personal-use license for TOPS-10 and TOPS-20.

Digital Equipment Corporation: KA, KI, KL, KS

16-Jun-2007: ComputerWorld's ad favorites over the last 40 years includesone from 9-Nov-1981: The Personal Mainfraime.

DEC equipment on the Net:

• DEC-10.PDPplanet.COM is a 2065 accessible on the network, running TOPS-10. So there's now an example of DEC hardware on the net. Paul Allen's machine (xkleten.paulallen.com) is an XKL-1 (a.k.a. TOAD-1) There are a couple of other XKL-1 systems in addition to XKL and Paul Allen, but they aren't public access. There are several klh10-based TOPS-20 systems up 24/7: lingling.panda.com, bi5.bootstrap.org, kankan.twenex.org, tops.drkngs.com, tina.update.uu.se. There are some others which are intermittantly up. Two ITS systems are intermittantly up: its.svensson.org, md.spacy.boston.ma.us.
  Corestore.org hasKL-10 andKS-2020 hardware, and links to other hobbiest-owned hardware.

Compatible hardware

• toad.xkl.com is running on a TOAD-1.
  They are still running an NCSA web server on toad.xkl.com,
  but it now redirects to Apache on an x86 box.
  XKL Systems TOAD, TOPS-20 Monitor 7(102605)-1
  HTTP/1.0 200 Document follows
  Date: Tue, 21 May 2002 %T GMT
  Server: NCSA/1.4.1
  Content-type: text/html
  Last-modified: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 %T GMT
  Location: http://cheshire.xkl.com
• Publicly accessable PDP-10 set up by Paul Allen (the other co-founder of Microsoft).
• Unknown number of SC40M systems running at Compuserve Classic at UUNET.
• No known instances FOONLY systems still running.

PDP-10 emulators

Run TOPS-10 or TOPS-20 on a KS-2020 emulator on your own hardware!
* Tim Stark's ts10
* Bob Supnick's simh
* Daniel Seagrave's dzclient
* Telnet into asuka.umtec.com, a Linux box running ts10 with dzclient.

## Developers, DECUS, People

* Report on the 30th Anniversary of 36 bits.
* Picture of Jim Flemming and Tony Wachs in front of a KL called "Chip" (at a DECUS in the early 80's). This picture was relayed to Kimo B. Yapkby@alumni.caltech.edu by Barb Huizenga and taken by Clive Dawson.
* Andy Tannenbaum's list of WPI hackers of the '70s.
* Picture of Bob Clements before PDP-10.
* Paul Allen, the other co-founder of Microsoft
* Bill Gates used a PDP-10 in college.
* Mark Crispin, developer of MM and IMAP.

My documents

* Pictures from the 36th Anniversary dinner (16-Jun-2001)
* Tymshare
* History
* Pictures: Reunion 1-Jul-2000
* Pictures: Bubb Road, 1980
* Pictures: Fremont Data Center, 1997
* Hardware (KI, KL, X-KL)
* Software (TYMCOM-X)
* Analysis of the RIM10B bootstrap loader.
* PDP-10 references in The Hacker's Dictionary.
* PDP-10 op-codes (in numeric order).
* 36 bit to 8 bit conversion for FTP, tapes.
* Program to analyze possible 36-bit tapes: <type36.c>
* List of model numbers, from 1040 to 2065.
* Mark Crispin's list of 36-bit CPUs.
* VT100 Torture Test (test for terminal emulators).
* List of ANSI ESCape sequences as implemented on the VT100 and LA34.
* Scan of badges from DECUS conventions.

## Manufacturers
* DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) cancelled the follow-on CPU 17-May-83.
* The Evolution of the DECsystem-10 (Bell, Kotok, Hastings and Hill) from Computer Engineering - Bell, Mudge, McNamara
* Foonly is out of the business. But their one-and-only F1 was used by Information International Inc (III) to render the graphics used in the movie "TRON". The legacy of that movie lives on as "Toy Story" and the TV show ReBoot.
* Tymshare made a 26KL system for the Augment project until McDonnell Douglas took over Tymnet and cancelled the project in 1987.
* The SC Group used to be known as Systems Concepts and is still selling their SC-40.
* Compuserve manufactured their own SC-25 systems for a while. (The SC Group licensed their design to Compuserve during the time when the SC-40 was being designed.)
* XKL renamed their TD-1 to TOAD-1, we have 2 CPUs in production.
* RP06 replacement bySETASI.

## Museums
* Scott and Eric's retrocomputing.
* List of Museums at the Charles Babbage Institute
* The Computer History Museum
* American Computer Museum in Bozeman, Montana
* Bob's Computer Museum
* Dan Murphy's TENEX (KA+BBN) pictures
* Interview of Gordon Bell from summer of 1995.
* Al Kossow's Minicomputer Orphanage
## Other documents
* PDP-10/TOPS-10 heard as "Doctor Memory" in Firesign Theatre's "We're All Bozos on this Bus":
* The big computer that runs everything in the FUTURE FAIR, described in the FT's BOZO play. The Doctor was also mentioned in a poem on the "Dear Friends" album. He is based on an old SAILON LISP program written for the PDP-10 running the TOPS-10 operating system. AhClem repeatedly calls Dr. Memory "Mac" - which far predates the current Apple computer line; but the MIT AI lab, where the Doctor program originated, grew out of Project Mac (for Machine Aided Cognition and/or Multiple Access Computer)
* Also known as ELIZA.
* DECsystem at RCS.
* Byte covers DECWORLD 2001.
* TOPS-10 Evolution - dates when features were added to the TOPS-10 Monitor.
* PDP-10 Kermit page at Columbia.
* DECSYSTEM-20 at Columbia University was mentioned on SlashDot.
* We're listed in YAHOO under http://www.yahoo.com/Computers/Hardware/Platforms/Digital/.
* Tim Shoppa's archive of PDP-10 software
* TAKE ME, I'M YOURS - The autobiography of SAIL
* Text-based role-playing games: ADVENT, ZORK, HAUNT.
* Soul of an Old Machine
* Tony in RH20 Land, or "I Should Have Listened When Mother Told Me There Was A Great Future In Encyclopedia Sales".
* Mr. Bill's DEC-20
* Software Wars
* DEC Wars (a parody of Star Wars)
* Harris S. Newman is working on re-implementing DECWAR (the multi-player game) in C.
* PDP models
* The man page for read20, a UNIX program to read TOPS-20 DUMPER tapes. C sources in <read20.tar>
* DUMPER aBLISS program in the DECUS library for reading TOPS-10/BACKUP and TOPS-20/DUMPER tapes on VAX/VMS. See also10BACKUP, written in MACRO-32 and VAX BASIC.
* John Wilson's collection of programs to read PDP-10 tapes that were written byTOPS-10,TOPS-20 and ITS.
* The pager used for ITS.
* Megan Gentry's computer interests, including dual-KL TOPS-10/SMP
* Big GIFs from XKL's flyer.
* Rob Austein's Alice's PDP-10 (sung to the tune of "Alice's Restaurant".) [local copy]
* Stuff at biostat.washington.edu
* Their alt.sys.pdp10archive
* Henry Baker's documents (copied to http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/ because Netcon's FTP server is constantly running up against the limit of simultaneous anonymous users).
* The famous HAKMEM file copied from ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/hb/hbaker/hakmem/hakmem.html
* MIT's info file on the PDP-10 instruction set copied from ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/hb/hbaker/pdp-10/pdp-10.html
* Sunsite's PDP-10documentation archive
* The Online Book Initiative at ftp://ftp.std.com/obi/DEC/36-bit/had two papers so far. [Archive offline, Jan 2001.] Local copies are in
* paper.smp - Symmetric Multi Processing
Allan Wilson and Jim Flemming
* History of TOPS20 (<paper-t20.txt>) andthree other TENEX papers.
Dan Murphy dlm@opost.com
* KA-10 with BBN Pager running Tenex: Dan Murphy, Tymshare.
* Stuff found at John Wilson's site ftp://ftp.dbit.com/pub/pdp10 (site formerly known as ftp://tats.wizvax.net/pub/pdp10)
* 36-bit history of Compuserve
* The ITS paper on PCLSRing
* Pictures of PDP-10s at MIT
* TECO
* ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/academic/computer-science/history/pdp-11/teco/
* ftp://ftp.wimsey.com/pub/teco/usc-archive/
* ftp://usc.edu/pub/teco/ [Archive offline, Jan 2001.]
* ftp://ftp.dbit.com/pub/pdp10/tops10/teco124.mac Note: this is the MACRO-10 sources, 240 Kb of 36-bit assembler code.
* A Web page dedicated to the game of ADVENTure (which includes a pointer to a nifty site that allows you to play ADVENT on the Web.)
* Sources to ADVENT
* Tom Knight's PDP-6 blueprints. (local copy)
* PDP-6 at the Australian Computer Museum.
* AI Memo 161a "ITS 1.5 Reference Manual".
* Carl Friend's photo of a KI-10
* Monitor Installation Guide 7.03
* Non-Unix OS History which has these details for TOPS-10:
1964=PDP-6 Monitor and TOPS-10 1.4; 1966=1.9; 1967=2.18; 1968=3.27; 1969=4.50 and 4.72; 1970=5.01; 1971=5.02; 1972=5.06; 1974=5.07 and 6.01; 1975=5.07A (last OS for KA-10); 1975=6.02; 1977=6.03; 1978=6.03LIR; 1979=7.02; 1980=7.01; 1983=7.02; 1985=7.03; 1988=7.04
Details for TOPS-20:
1969=TENEX; 1976=TOPS-20 v1; 1977=v2; 1978=v3; 1980=v3A; 1981=v4; 1982=v5; 1985=v6; 1988=v7;
* Phil's history of the monitor.
* Old documents forwarded by Klaus Zeuge
* Lineage of PDP systems
* KL1269 needs a home....
* The giveaway of the 2020 at Lysator
* The History of TOPS, or Life in the Fast AC's
* misc-links
* Ken Harrenstien's KLH10 emulator announcement
* Log of Stu Grossman's KX10 emulator in action
* Facebook: Happy DEC-20 Day!
* Michael Thompson's DECSYSTEM-2020 KS10, S/N 4224
* YouTube video: PDP 10 arrives at James Cook University, in Queensland, Australia.
## News and mailing lists
* Newsgroup: selected articles from alt.sys.pdp10
* Newsgroup: another archive
* Mailing list:
## Misc
Date: Wed, 02 Aug 95 11:23:03 -0400
From: dbj@MPGN.COM (David E. Brooks Jr)
Organization: Tantalus Incorporated
Subject: Interesting little tid-bit
Hi,
Just for kicks, I ran 'DECsystem-ten' through the internet
anagram server (http://www.wordsmith.org/awad-cgibin/anagram)
and it came back with "Decent System".
Very appropriate, I thought.
-- Dave Brooks
Updated: Thursday, 21-Oct-2021 09:00:02 EDT

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