Videos documenting restorations of exceptional vintage electronics and early computers, space hardware and the odd mechanical calculator or Teletype. It often showcases my Hewlett-Packard test equipment collection and, from time to time, my R2-D2 robot build. Things rarely work when I start, but almost always do when I end. A nerdy place for your inner engineer, to celebrate engineering exploits of our predecessors, and learn a lot from it. To contact me, use the CAPTCHA protected email link below.
Hi Marc, do you know of a musuem, which has a larger collection of microprocessor development systems ? I worked a long time in front of MDS like from INTL ( 8085 ) or Tektronix ( SBP9900 ) etc. and it would be fun, seeing some again.
At college, we had a PDP-11/23 and, later, an 11/73 but they were both later models without blinkenlichts... seeing these gorgeous replicas of the earlier models... I feel like DEC somehow "cheated" us. ;)
I bought already the pdp8 some time ago , now I have to place the pdp 10 onto my near wishlist ... great work ... also the pdp 11 is on my wishlist ... UPDATE: just preordered the Pdp10 version.
I just looked up the price of PiDP-10 console. NOT BAD! That is a BARGAIN for what it is! I never had much interest in PDP's, but maybe that should change now.
Hello Oscar, The new PiDP-10 looks just amazing, like it's brothers. You do such great work on these, the detailing is wonderful. Maybe some day I can justify owning one.. Just sent out two more of your nifty Kim UNO kits this morning. There is still interest out there, people seem to really like them. Hope you are well, Bill in St Paul
We have many PDP computers in operstion at our museum..just recently aquired a "dekstop" pdp-8 s/n 13 this thing weighs over 200# We have the only running PDP-9 in the country. We demonstrated this machime to Oscar when he visited with us. Give me an IBM mainframe anyday
Thank you so much for this video, which is both interesting and informative. I have only built a PiDP8/I so far, but am inspired by all the work being done on the other models. Looking forward to reliving the years I spent on PDP11s.
I learned BASIC on a DEC PDP 11/70 in high school. The computer lab consisted of a DECwriter and an acoustic coupler modem. I spent many hours after school playing Adventure.
Sometimes I think we love those machines for the same reasons that kids love dinosaurs: a) They are long extinct, so they have this alien feel to it. b) it's fun to spot features that survived evolution, and others that have gone extict with them. EMACS on the PDP-10!! No passwords on ITS!! c) the thought "how was it possible for those creatures to once rule the world with THOSE kind of brains?" I have two PiDP-8is, one PiDP-11 (running 2.11BSD and crunching some seismic data every night) an now one PiDP-10 (ITS). Great kits, high quality, lots of software to go with it.
True, but many of us used these actual machines. Dinosaurs we did not interact with. But I still love dinosaurs. My brother and I used to play with plastic dinosaurs as kids.
I would like to add that many, many people have been involved over the years preserving, restoring, and reviving ITS. Oscar and I really are standing on the proverbal shoulders of giants. To tell a rambling story. Already in the 80s when ITS was still in use, people like Alan Bawden, Penny Berman, and David Moon preserved the old ITS backup tapes and transferred them to newer tapes. Much later Brad Parker et al did a huge job to read the bits off the tapes. There were thousands, not only from ITS but also other PDP-10s at MIT and other types of computers. Without this backup archive we would only have a small sliver of the full ITS environment we have today. In the early 90s, Ken Harrenstien made the first PDP-10 (model KS10) emulator and brought up ITS. In the early 2000s, hacker and DEC megastar Bob Supnik made another PDP-10 emulator (also KS10) which he made available to the public. Now anyone could run ITS on their computer. Björn Victor recreated the AI lab Chaos networking technology and made it work with Lisp machines and such. My own involvement started as a script to automate the ITS installation instructions. Very soon after I posted this online, Eric Swenson got in touch. He's a former Maclisp and Macsyma developer who had helped a lot with the GitHub project over the years. Many more people have chipped in, but I also want to credit Adam Samson who did magic debugging and restoring Muddle/MDL. Eric made use of that to get Zork running again in its native environment, a huge milestone. Much of the groundwork of writing emulators was enabled by Al Kossow's astounding Bitsavers collection of documentation, manuals, schematics, etc for old computers. Richard Cornwell wrote the first KA10 emulator. This is the PDP-10 model that was used in the AI lab, and has the most interesting zoo of weird and wonderful peripheral devices. This ushered in a new era of emulating almost all of the AI lab hardware. One of the first which was the Type 340 display, contributed by Phil Budne, which runs many iconic ITS and pre-ITS PDP-6 programs. Angelo Papenhoff provided the Knight TV hardware and the bitmapped raster displays.
No. ITS _DID_ have a security feature. If you executed the system call to get write access to OS memory, it would return a "CALL FAILED" indicator, which actually giving you access. This meant that folks not in on the joke would think they couldn't access system memory.
I had some happy days in the late 80s working on PDP-11/73 for V.G. (Vacuum Generators) Scientific who made surface science instruments i.e. microscopes of varying types. Mainly in Pascal if I remember correctly. Lots of fun developing code with overlays and remapping of the 8th address page register and so on :)
@0:44 - If you want to get familiar with metric measurements and metric hardware, get a couple of 3D printers and start tinkering with them. That will get you immersed REAL quick.
Regarding "shrdlu": My Dad was in the Signal Corp in WWII. He told me that radio teletype operators would reply "Repeat after etaoin shrdlu." after receiving garbled text. Of course, this was an inside joke as the sender would have no idea idea where to begin resending. Years later I learned the connection this string has with the Linotype machine.
I was fortunate to meet Oscar at VCF East some years ago when he was just completing his remarkable pi PDP-8. I bought his original model before the switches were updated. I may just have to buy another, the accurate switches are amazing.
off topic ....... Could you look for ..... Computer Automation - mini computers ? Alpha 16,, LSI-2 & 4:30 and maybe SCOUT Cambridge University UK, Dr Martian Richards he of BCPL ,, his students wrote TripOS which was ported to 68000 and became Amiga OS ,,,, another bit of computing History
Tommy Flowers was responsible for using electronics to create Colossus,, I believe he pointed out that the bomb used to break enigma could have used electronics just like Colossus but the British initially didn't believe electronics was reliable to do the job !!!
the polish broke the Enigma made a machine called the BOMB which was extend as more wheels were added . as stated below " The Colossus was actually used to crack the Lorentz cypher, " which had 24 wheels and was kept secret as the Russians used captured machines as they invaded Germany and Colossus could keep breaking their traffic.
In 1999 my employer of the time was dumping their PDP/11 machines because they weren't Y2K compliant. The whole PDP/11 at our site, complete with tape drive and RL02 disk drives was heading for the skip. However a collector emailed me, he had hoped to get the PDP/11 from another site of the same employer but they had dumped it already. I dismantled the PDP/11 and got it onto a company van to send to him, and he got it running again. Alas the tape drive and RL02 drives (fully working and some with recent bearings having been fitted) ended up the in skip.
I confess that all of this was new to me except Shrdlu - I have fond memories of running a BASIC version of that (and many other AI programs) on my Amstrad CPC6128 in the 1980s!
They're not kidding about how "security" was handled on ITS - in "later years" (1985ish) it was common for curious undergrads to log in as RMS (no password - there were some things like connecting to other systems that required you be logged in as *somebody*, they just weren't picky about who), and then someone would message you and ask you to please create an account with your own name on it if you were going to actually use the system and not just be a tourist. Sort of "onboarding via honeypot" :-)
My dad tells a story about how he was working with researchers in a hospital. They put through an order for a PDP-11 computer and it was declined, so they sent through a new order for a programmed data processor and were able to get it across the line 😅 2:12
The keyboard on a Linotype typesetting machine was arranged according to letter frequency, in columns from left to right. The first two columns read ETAOIN SHRDLU. If the typesetter (the human) made a typo, there was no backspace or undo, so they would 'run out' the current piece of hot metal type being cast by the machine by running their fingers down the first two or three columns of keys. It's a type of filler text (like Lorem Ipsum) that's been showing up in various places in popular culture since at least the 1920s. 😻
Me too, I remember people hanging around outside the door to the computer room waiting for someone else to enter the boot loader :) My final year project was an AI that played Monopoly, I wrote it initially in Algol and translated it to PDP-8 assembler. My friend got a better mark for his project: an implementation of the trivial game of noughts & crosses (tic-tac-toe) mainly because it used the Direct View Storage Tube (a primitive graphics terminal) to draw the game - and I was the one that wrote that bit :(
And my venture into "computer music" - a program that was a simple loop whose length was determined by the setting of the panel switches to generate different frequencies. I then had an AM radio tuned off channel next to the PDP-8 which picked up the EMI emitted by the computer and played the note. I can't remember now if I took it to the next step of storing a tune as data, I suspect my initial tests showed there wasn't a lot of promise!
@@TonyWhitley I had to program it in Assembler, self-modifying code and all that. I was a Ph.D. student at the time and used a PDP-8S cast off by the high energy physics dept to read in paper tape, translate to a different format and punch out paper tape that could be read by the university computer. Them paper tape readers and punches were something else! In my first job (1980) I was handed a project "we were waiting for somebody with PDP-8 assembler" to modify the control system for the bright beer bottling section of the Carlsberg brewery in Northampton. 12 KW of memory running about 100 parallel tasks and controlling as many valves and motors. It's amazing what you can do in assembler if you really have to.
This is an amazing work of art! I checked the link, and I was shocked at how low of a price he is asking for these----sharing the love of these systems is obviously much more important to him that making the most profit he can. I'm truly impressed!
Oscar agonized a great deal about the price, figuring out how to keep it as low as possible. He truly has a passion for putting computer history in the hands of ordinary people.
The late 1960s price for the KA10 CPU (what the PiDP-10 emulates) was $160,000. A 16kW (36 bit word + parity) was around $35K. (About the price of a house.) Hmm, maybe more - a dollar a byte was a good price for PDP-11 core.
Back in the day, I wrote a lot of PDP-10 assembly code used to control 90 foot tall robots in automated warehouse systems for a company called Eaton Kenway. Also programmed PDP-11 with Fortran and IBM Series/1 running EDX (Event Driven Executive) OS and programing with EDL (Event Driven Language), an interpreted language (these might be something you don't yet know about, Marc). All in the late 70s to early 80s. And all for Eaton Kenway. Thanks for yet another stroll down memory lane.
Somehow these machines manage to look old-fashioned and futuristic at the same time, which is really a testament to good design. Either way they're beautiful machines. Modern computer designers have a lot to answer for! At least nowadays you can get colourful keycaps thanks to keyboard enthusiasts, but the fact that pretty much everything else is either silver, black or grey is really a travesty. Sure, there's the odd gaming laptop with an RGB backlit keyboard or light strip, and obviously the current iMac is colourful. And yes, you can build a custom RGB lit PC, but you don't walk into your local big box retailer and see any other options.
I cut my programming teeth on an 11/40 in 1975 (Yes I have an 8 and 11 kit on my wall) Only the advanced maths students had access to the schools computer, however I had befriended the Computer Teacher who let me on the machine afterhours. My maths was not that good however I believed that computers in the future were not 'ivory tower' machines doing higher maths.. but machines capable of sorting string informations, printing invoices etc, What we nowadays mostly use the comuters for :) I have do many fond memories of working on the machine.. debating the furture of computing with the maths students.. and actually getting my first programming job in 78. Now at 64, I have retired after a lifetime of working on mini's and PCs - doing things in my early years that were considered 'impossible' , and always being happy straddling hardware and software instead of 'speciaizing' Some of my creations were a natural language processor and self modifying code on a TRS-80, file locking and record sharing on a shared hard drive (no - no network or TCP stack), and military stuff I cannot talk about :(
Marc, another university system had its own multi-user graphical system around the same time, by the name PLATO, including a very popular and influential game called _Avatar_ . Would love to see you take a look at some of that!
Wow... 1959 tech wasn't so primitive after all ;) Too bad that sort of high-res capability was mainly used by the military... I prefer the more peaceful application of the PDP for sure :) Imagine someone writing a fractal program on that display...
