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.

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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).

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Digital Equipment Corporation: Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering company in the American computer industry. They are generally referred to within the computing industry as DEC. (This acronym was once officially used by DEC itself, but later discarded.) .They were later acquired by Compaq, which subsequently merged wi...

1960s: The 1960s, or The Sexy Sixties, in its most obvious sense refers to the decade between 1960 and 1969, but the expression has taken on a wider meaning over the past twenty years. The Sixties has come to refer to the complex of inter-related cultural and political events which occurred in approximatel...

Time-sharing: Time-sharing is an approach to interactive computing in which a single computer is used to provide apparently simultaneous interactive general-purpose computing to multiple users by sharing processor time....