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+ ITS Reconstruction Project
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News! Workshop/demonstration: The ITS Reconstruction Project on
the PiDP-10. At the MIT museum, Boston - April 1. Click here for the
information flyer
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The dedicated PiDP-10 website:
PiDP-10 Details
The ITS Reconstruction Project:
ITS Reconstruction
The PiDP10 development blog:
Rebirth of an old machine
How to get one
CEDS makes the PiDP-10 for us, as a
kit ($370) or assembled & tested ($495)
Adopt a 10
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Software Highlights
To show that mainframes, too, can be fun :-)
[shrdlu]
Shrdlu
The first AI to understand a 3D world, obey English commands
[spacewar]
Spacewar!
The first videogame ever, on a radar tube display
[lisp]
Lisp & emacs
Emacs was born on the 10, where Lisp grew up
[mazewar]
Mazewar
Play maze war with friends across the world. Networked!
[machack]
Chess (Mac Hack)
First program to win against a human in a tournament. Graphics!
[life]
Game of Life
The original - Bill Gosper's own source code to play with
[zork]
Adventure & Zork
All of them. All the original PDP-10 versions. You are in a cave.
[flight]
Filght Simulator
Not quite the same as Microsoft's FS
[other]
...And much, much more
Click here for the list of recovered ITS software
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Hardware Highlights
The MIT AI Lab had lots of useful hardware to keep the PDP-10
occupied with. A sample of virtual hardware that's also built in to
the PiDP-10 replica:
[type340]
Type 340 Display Tube
High Res graphics on a radar tube - vectordot graphics
[pdp6]
PDP-6
Shared the PDP-10's memory banks through a neat hack
[imp]
Interface Message Processor
The IMP router, heart of the early internet
[knight]
Knight TV terminals
The default terminals at MIT, driven by a PDP-11
[vt05]
VT05
DEC's first terminal, pretty but dumb
[vt52]
VT-52
The industry-standard terminal - ugly but smart
[tek]
Tektronix 4010
Ultra high res graphics. Using zero memory: a storage tube!
[dp3300]
Datapoint 3300
Deluxe terminal with graphics. Home of mazewar.
[xgp]
XGP Laser Printer
First laser printer, do your academic papers on PiDP-10
[teletype]
Teletype Model 33
We keep the worst for last. But the PiDP-10 includes the audio!
[robot]
Not included, alas
The famous robot arm. You'll have to put the sugar cube in your
coffee yourself.
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Books
Click the covers to get you started, but bitsavers.org and Google
will find many more good books!
[10-ref-han]
System reference manual
Great bed-time reading, the system and CPU in great detail
[10-sys-use]
System users guide
For the early 1967 Monitor system (pre TOPS-10)
[10-tops10]
TOPS-10 manual set
The OS, Cobol, Fortran, Assembler etc
[10-asm-lan]
Assembly language hbk
Good bed-time reading. 1973 System & CPU reference.
[10-sze-int]
Intro to DECsystem10
Written for students at Univ. Pittsburgh, good intro
The PiDP-10
DEC's 1968 mainframe that became a hacker playground at the MIT AI
Lab
[PiDP-10_13]
The MIT AI Lab, with a PDP-10 at its heart, was hugely important in
computer history, with many 'firsts' on its record. Over the past
decade, a group of enthusiasts did a full reconstruction of the Lab's
hardware and software as it stood in the 1970s. The PiDP-10 gives a
physical shape to this project, we regard it as a 'computer history
capsule'. A self-contained, compact replica that gives an experience
as close as possible to the real machine and the AI Lab. But now at
home, perhaps even in the living room.
[mainframe-]
Our goal is not to show computer history, but to keep hands-on
experience of it alive. The PiDP-10 lets you operate highlights of
the AI Lab hardware, the ITS operating system, and hundreds of
applications as they evolved during the late 1960s and 70s. One
particular example is Shrdlu: the first demonstration of AI that in
the 70s, triggered the first massive wave of interest in the field.
PiDP-10 PiDP-10 PiDP-10 PiDP-10 PiDP-10 PiDP-10 PiDP-10 PiDP-10
PiDP-10 PiDP-10 [PiDP-10_13]
Background Story
In 1968, the PDP-10, model KA10, brought DEC into the world of
mainframe-class machines. The PDP-6 had already defined the
architecture four years earlier: a 36 bits CPU with a rich, very
complex instruction set that feels completely esoteric today. Alas,
the PDP-6 was notoriously unreliable. It took the PDP-10 before DEC
got it right.
The fact that it was designed for real-time multiprocessing set it
apart from other mainframes: this was the Big Iron that you used
interactively on a terminal. No batch processing with punch cards.
Thus, hackable. Its TOPS-10 operating system was groundbreaking,
starting the lineage of RT-11 (PDP-11), OS/8 (PDP-8), CP/M and in the
end of the line, MS-DOS. But TOPS-10 was much more powerful than the
microcomputer OSes it inspired, properly multi-user, multi-tasking.
[lcm-ka10]
The PDP-10 at the LCM in Seattle, where we could verify our front
panel's exact behaviour
Famous from computer lore, the PDP-10 was also the breeding ground
for the early Hacker Culture at MIT, made famous by Levy's book
Hackers. At the Artifical Intelligence Lab, the Ten was at the heart
of a large collection of connected hardware, and its ITS operating
system became a playground for computer scientists and hackers alike.
MacLisp, emacs, the earliest AI demos, they were born on ITS. An
operating system so esoteric that the debugger doubled as the command
line, and although massively multi-user, connected to the early
internet, open for all to visit - it had no password or security.
Anyone from anywhere could join for a game of multi-user Mazewar on
it - or crash the whole system. Which nobody seemed to do as it was
just too easy to be cool.
[mit-ml-con]
The original MIT PDP-10 console, a bit worse for wear after a decade
of hackers' gefingerpoken
Free software was born here, Stallman was one of the ITS hackers.
But, funny enough, Microsoft as well: Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote
Micro Soft Basic on a PDP-10 at Harvard, running their homebrew 8080
emulator. Allen's love for the PDP-10 drove him to a full restoration
of a KA10 in the 2010s. And in fact, when that restored machine came
to life, it gave us the one and only opportunity to check our our
replica against a live real machine. Sadly, Allen passed away just
before the restoration was completed, and the future of The Last KA10
looks dim now. Making us even more grateful for that tiny time slot
in which we could perfect the replica's behaviour.
[arpanet]
The Ten also played a key role in early networking. MIT had its own
Chaosnet running early on, and soon, with the Interface Message
Processor (IMP), it connected to the ARPANET, that would evolve into
the modern-day internet. All the PDP-10s in this chart of the ARPANET
in March 1977 are marked in yellow. As the IMP is included in the
PiDP-10 simulator, plans are afoot to recreate this early ARPANET
snapshot with a group of PiDP-10 and -11s.
Technical Specs
The Ten was renowned for its refined 36-bit architecture (each word
being 36 bits wide). The instruction set was huge, encompassing
arithmetic, logical, and control operations with various addressing
modes to enable fast data manipulation and control flow handling. The
architecture relied on a microcoded control unit for instruction
execution, featuring separate instruction and data spaces. With a
36-bit word size and addressing, it offered access to a
then-astonishing 256 kilowords (over a megabyte in 8-bit bytes)
memory address space. Its puny clock speed of around 0.6 MHz is
misleading in today's terms - the 36 bit instructions packed a lot of
punch in a cycle. I/O subsystems included magnetic tape drives, disk
drives, printers, card readers, and communication interfaces.
Why you need one at home
Paul Allen wanted one at home, so it must make sense. It is simply
the only mainframe ever that became a playground for hackers. As a
result, hundreds of applications, games, high-res graphics demos (on
a repurposed radar tube) and AI projects are installed on the
reconstructed ITS disk images. Controlling ITS is not all that hard,
and mastery of it is rewarded by this huge playground of available
software, much of it prototyping for the first time applications that
we now take for granted.
So, it's fun. The only mainframe ever that became a geek playground.
But the historical significance should not be ignored - Free
Software, the Hacker Ethos, early AI programming, it is fascinating
to see that at your fingertips. It's also a networked machine, so the
[S:ARPANET:S] Internet is at your fingertips. And don't think you
need to be a computer genius to operate a 1960s mainframe, either.
The benefit of hindsight helps: things that were once novel and
mysterious become fairly obvious to people who've grown up with
computers...
What to do with a mainframe in your living room?
[pdp10-flip]
The PDP-10 predates chips, it is made out of circuit boards ('flip
chips') with simple transistors, etc.
They are plugged into back planes, with wires making up the circuit.
Amazingly, this was quite reliable.
[backplane]
Replica Details
Hardware:
We replicated the KA10's iconic looks through an injection-molded
case. Over half a meter wide, the front panel drives 124 lamps and 74
switches. The simulator was written by Rich Cornwell as part of the
simh project. And, normally, runs on a built-in Raspberry Pi 5.
Depending on the workload that you put on the simulated PDP-10, in
fact, the PiDP-10 will be a dual-hearted machine. You can
concurrently use the Pi Inside as a regular Linux system. Giving the
PiDP-10 more justification to reside in the living room; it can
double as network storage, media server or whatever else you'd like
to do with a Pi. As long as you do not put more than 10 or so
concurrent users on your PDP-10, the Pi will handle both roles
seamlessly.
[exploded]
Exploded view of the kit prototype. It's not that hard to build
yourself a mainframe.
Software:
TOPS-10 is one boot option. It brings you into an environment that
pretty much defined the standard for later OSes that ran on simpler
hardware. Yes, this is at the root of the evolutionary tree that led
to MS-DOS. But TOPS-10 was much more powerful, harnessing a
multi-user, multi-tasking OS with a full set of programming languages
and applications. Oh, and you can play the original Adventure, among
other terminal games.
However, ITS will be the more appealing operating system to boot up
in the 21st century. The PiDP-10's purpose was to give physical shape
to the ITS reconstruction project of Lars Brinkhoff et al. Simulated
is not just the PDP-10 itself, but also lots of related hardware in
the AI Lab. Such as a PDP-6 that shared its expensive memory with the
10, a couple of PDP-11s, a range of terminals and even the IMP
device: the famous network router that first morphed the ARPANET into
Internet. The PiDP-10's simulated environment is, in fact, almost the
entire MIT AI Lab, not just the PDP-10 itself. The ITS reconstruction
project is an infinitely deep rabbit hole if you want to dig into it,
encapsulating the work of hundreds of hackers at MIT in the 1960s and
70s.
In case you think there's nothing to see on 1960s mainframes, here's
a look at the default PiDP-10 display:
PiDP-10 screen shot
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Tweets
Tweets by Oscar_CEDS
Posts
* PiDP-10 Google Group
the community
* Details on the PiDP-10 replica
Oscar's PiDP-10 site
* ITS Reconstruction Project
a labour of love for the past 15 years
* simh PDP-10 simulator
The PiDP-10's brain
* ITS Boot Camp
and live ITS login as well!
* ITS Manual (WIP)
find your way around IT
* Turist's guide to ITS
old but useful first impression of ITS
* MIT Museum
on location where it happened
Photos
[yt-tnmoc]
[yt-securit]
[yt-retroby]
[yt-11list]
[teletype8]
[tour8]
[yt-shrdlu]
[10list]
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