[rescue] Finding antique machines

[John Francini]

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
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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