PDP-10

The PDP-10 was a computer manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from the late 1960s on; the name stands for "Programmed Data Processor model 10". It was the machine that made time-sharing common; it looms large in hacker folklore because of its adoption in the 1970s by many university computing facilities and research labs, the most notable of which were MIT's AI Lab and Project MAC, Stanford's SAIL, and CMU.

Related Topics:
Digital Equipment Corporation - 1960s - Time-sharing - Hacker folklore - 1970s - MIT - AI Lab - Project MAC - Stanford - SAIL - CMU

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The PDP-10 architecture was an almost identical version of the earlier PDP-6 architecture, sharing the same 36-bit word length and slightly extending the instruction set (but with improved hardware implementation). Some aspects of the instruction set are still considered unsurpassed, most notably the "byte" instructions, which operated on arbitrary sized bit-fields (at that time a byte was not necessarily eight bits).

Related Topics:
PDP-6 - 36-bit word length - Instruction set - Byte

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