[rescue] Finding antique machines
John Francini
francini at mac.com
Fri Apr 20 07:07:05 CDT 2007
At 14:52 +0300 4/20/07, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
>On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 07:25:04AM -0400, John Francini wrote:
>> The TOPS-10 Monitor (the old term for what we call an "OS") dates
>> straight back to the original code written for the PDP-6 (DEC's first
>> 36-bit product) in 1963. The first model of the PDP-10, the KA-10,
>> which debuted in 1968, didn't have virtual memory or paging. These
>> were new and (commercially) untested concepts, though they were
>> already operational on Multics at MIT.
>
>IBM was shipping 360 Model 67's with virtual memory and paging hardware
>in July 1966.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360-67
>
>So new and commericaly untested applied to DEC, not the rest of the world.
Indeed. One thing the 36-bit engineers and management at Digital were
not, was risk-taking.
>
>One nice thing about the PDP-10 is it was not little endian.
Yup. All of DEC's "multiple-of-six" computers were big-endian: the
PDP-1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 16. It was "only" the PDP-11 and
the VAX that were exclusively little-endian. The Alpha was
byte-sexual -- it could go either way.
j
>Geoff.
>
>--
>Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com N3OWJ/4X1GM
>IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 Fax ONLY: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838
>Visit my 'blog at http://geoffstechno.livejournal.com/
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--
John Francini, francini at mac.com
"The journey is more important than the destination -- that's part of life.
If you only live for getting to the end, you're almost always disappointed."
-- Donald Knuth
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