[HN Gopher] PiDP-10 - a modern replica of the PDP-10
___________________________________________________________________
PiDP-10 - a modern replica of the PDP-10
Author : skilled
Score : 99 points
Date : 2024-06-09 07:31 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (obsolescence.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (obsolescence.dev)
| skilled wrote:
| See also,
|
| https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp10
|
| Relevant links,
|
| _PIDP-10 SYSTEMS USER'S GUIDE_
|
| https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2...
|
| (direct download: https://obsolescence.dev/pidp10-sw/manual.docx)
|
| _PiDP-10 system software package_
| (https://github.com/obsolescence/pidp10)
| jonatron wrote:
| I've got to appreciate how much effort must have gone into an
| injection molded replica case, it looks fantastic.
| nigwil_ wrote:
| Or a video introduction if you prefer:
| https://youtu.be/E0Pp63gsdZI?si=yJCX-CS1T6zsYiLY
| TomMasz wrote:
| I love that these sorts of things exist. If I had the room and
| the time I would buy one without hesitation, but I have neither.
| gumby wrote:
| My first computing experience was on the MIT-AI KA-10 (which was
| the first one ever installed). It was already semi-obsolete by
| then, with CADR lispms in use as well.
|
| Having the debugger always available (no need for the old
| fashioned idea of core dumps) and the tight integration of the
| the PDP-10 instruction set and MACLISP (the '6 and then '10 were
| explicitly designed by Gordon Bell to run Lisp) was the perfect
| introduction to the power and fun of computing, as was the early
| state of Emacs.
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| My first experience was when I was a coop student at
| DEC/Marlboro. First summer, I learned the -10 and wrote sysdpy
| in BLISS-10. Next summer, I wrote the KL-10 spooler - in
| assembly language. Folks these days don't appreciate that early
| OSs were all written in assembler because - efficiency! TOPS-20
| was a well-curated set of JRSTs and Macros -- building blocks
| to build code quickly. Great, well-written assembly is an
| existential joy to read.
|
| During my 2nd summer, I wrote a memo to Gordon Bell, suggesting
| we (DEC) not burn effort on the LSI-11; I suggested to him that
| we build the LSI-10 and take over the 'microcomputer' market
| since there was so much -10 software. He wrote back "Do it!"
| but, I had to go back to school in the fall, so I didn't get
| that done. sorry, everybody, everywhere.
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| I built the PiDP-11 during Covid when stuck at home. I had
| basically zero soldering experience so I bought a $10 soldering
| practice kit online first, but other than that it's doable by
| anyone. It was super fun. I had to take it apart later when I had
| a set of LEDs that wouldn't work and poked around until I found a
| solder I had messed up. That was also fun. It sits in my office
| running blinkenlights most of the time these days - anyway would
| recommend buying one of these kits!
|
| Edit: I'd guess it took about 6 hours for me to finish over the
| course of several days, if you are good at soldering it will be
| cheaper. I stopped a lot to double check stuff like polarity on
| the LEDs (I think it was LEDs) and what-not.
| chasil wrote:
| There was also a microprocessor implementation of the PDP-11.
|
| "T-11 is a microprocessor that implements the PDP-11
| instruction set architecture. It was developed for embedded
| systems and was the first single-chip microprocessor developed
| by DEC. It was sold on the open market."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-11#Special-purpose_version...
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| For those not close to the PDP family, the numbers don't really
| mean anything. The 11 is not better than the 10 in any way, they
| are just the order in which they were released.
|
| The PDP-10 was not a mini-computer for which PDPs are generally
| associated with, but instead it was a mainframe and had a 36-bit
| word. The switches were coloured in sets of three to aid in
| entering octal data (as opposed to hexadecimal).
| eschneider wrote:
| Well...the -11 does have a super-clean assembly language. That
| machine was a joy to work on.
| IndrekR wrote:
| Used to write MSP430 (a Texas Instruments MCU family that was
| designed and manufactured in Freising, Germany in '90s)
| assembly language for a while more than two decades ago. It
| was mentioned with pride that the instruction set is based on
| PDP-11.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| > Well...the -11 does have a super-clean assembly language.
|
| Sorry, I meant objectively better in an absolute sense. Just
| that it's not like the -11 is a sequel to the -10 like a 486
| to a 386 is. But you are absolutely right, there are definite
| strengths of each platform from an enthusiast perspective.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Yes but PDP-10 is pretty good: there is only one instruction
| format, so the instruction set is very uniform.
|
| It's, shall we say, delightfully weird in its support of
| bytes and half-words (addresses).
|
| Also: having 256K words is much better than 64 KB.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Arbitrarily sized bytes from 1 to 36 bits, and sub-word
| byte pointers, and indirect pointers! (You can do a lot
| with those extra 18 bits above the address lines, it's not
| just for consing!)
|
| https://github.com/PDP-10/documents/blob/master/mirror/www.
| i... Byte instructions In the
| PDP-10 a "byte" is some number of contiguous bits within
| one word. A byte pointer is a quantity (which
| occupies a whole word) which describes the location
| of a byte. There are three parts to the description
| of a byte: the word (i.e., address) in which the byte
| occurs, the position of the byte within the word, and the
| length of the byte. A byte pointer has the
| following format: 000000 000011 1 1 1111
| 112222222222333333 012345 678901 2 3 4567
| 890123456789012345
| _________________________________________ | |
| | | | | | | POS | SIZE |U|I| X
| | Y |
| |______|______|_|_|____|__________________| POS
| is the byte position: the number of bits from the right end
| of the byte to the right end of the word.
| SIZE is the byte size in bits. The U field is
| ignored by the byte instructions. The I, X and Y
| fields are used, just as in an instruction, to compute
| an effective address which specifies the location of the
| word containing the byte. Here are
| the byte instructions. [...] LDB DPB IBP ILDB IDPB
| [...] Text strings are typically stored using
| seven-bit bytes, five per word. ILDB and IDPB can
| then be used to step through a string. The byte
| pointer should be initialized to 440700,,<address of
| string>. Then the first ILDB will increment it to
| point at the first character of the string.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I've got one of Lars's t-shirts:
|
| "IF YOUR COMPUTER DOES NOT HAVE 36 BITS, YOU'RE NOT PLAYING
| WITH A FULL DEC..." -- attributed to Doug Humphrey (DIGEX)
| trolling the 32 bit VAX Weenies at DECUS.
|
| https://techsquare.myspreadshop.com/36-bit+full+dec-A64fef41...
|
| The LMI Lisp Machines Inc. one is quite classy (or rather
| flavory) too:
|
| https://techsquare.myspreadshop.com/lisp+machine+inc-A6417f5...
|
| And a lot more, including Zork, INTERFACE MESSAGE PROCESSOR,
| decsystem10, digital PDP-10 (also in tie dye!), digital pdp11,
| IMLAC, GENERAL TURTLE INC., bbn Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.
| TENEX, Multics: IF YOU LIKE IT SO MUCH WHY DON'T YOU PUT EIGHT
| RINGS ON IT, MUDDLE 39 IN OPERATION. LISTENING-AT-LEVEL 1
| PROCESS 1, INTERLISP, FOONLY, X Window System Screen Background
| + X Cursor [wretch!], and more!
|
| https://techsquare.myspreadshop.com/all
|
| I had an even uglier X-Windows t-shirt that I got at the first
| X11 conference at MIT. It was simply a black and white screen
| dump with a bunch of incredibly hideous Athena Widgets apps
| (aka the Anathema Toolkit) like the original X11 netnews and
| email readers, the infamous butt-ugly xfontsel font selector
| (for selecting butt-ugly-fonts-with-butt-ugly-logical-font-
| description-names), and xterm, xlogo, xclock, xcalc, etc, on an
| audacious lime green background, and I loved to wear it to show
| off how terrible X-Windows was, and totally wore it out. If
| anyone still has one I'd pay good money for it!
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Xfontsel.png
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_logical_font_description
|
| Here's what happens to xcalc if you stretch it around too much
| -- its layout manager loses its elasticity and begins to look
| like Donatella Versace after her 10th botched plastic surgery
| attempt:
|
| https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/x-window...
|
| To mitigate that problem, I hacked the OLWM window manager so I
| could run it with a window id parameter to use as the root
| window, and gave it xcalc's client window id, so it wrapped
| frames around each of the buttons, and I could drag them around
| and resize them to repair the damage, make the important ones
| really big, arrange the digits in any order, and even iconify
| the buttons I didn't need. But that was even uglier with the
| OPEN LOOK frames around each button, and was a far cry from
| HyperCard.
| beezle wrote:
| I couldn't find it .. is this running TOPS-10? TOPS-20? Would
| be nice to have my very own pet TOPS-2060 to use and abuse
| again! Fond memeories from the early 80s
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Ohhhhh it's finally out! I know he's been working on it for ages.
| it looks beautiful.
|
| Not sure if I'll get it though. It costs a lot (I won't call it
| expensive because I know the quality is worth it). And it takes
| up a lot of space.
|
| I already have the PiDP-8 and PiDP-11. This PiDP-10 looks like
| even better quality. Wow.
|
| The attention to detail in these kits is awesome. He spent so
| much time getting the frontpanel just right, with the multicolour
| printing, the blur layer etc. I used to have access to a real
| PDP-11 and I have to say it's really well done.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| That is simply gorgeous. I had considered building the PiDP-11,
| but the raspberry pi rabbit hole got lost on my hobby list of
| things to do. I might circle back to it as some point.
| F00Fbug wrote:
| I want one of these but don't have that kind of money to spend on
| a toy. There's always this:
|
| https://skn.noip.me/pdp10/pdp10.html
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Rob Griffiths interview from GET LAMP:
|
| GET LAMP: Rob Griffiths
|
| Rob is a perfect example of the benefits of not going just for
| "names" in a documentary about a wide-ranging subject - nothing
| on his resume says he was a big text adventure game player or
| person who was at the beginning of Zork. But there he was, a kid
| who had gotten into the MIT lab and seen early Zork being played
| and the effect it was having on the students and computer lab
| users. He was articulate and provided a wonderful dash of emotion
| into the descriptions which I used liberally in GET LAMP. He had
| a number of printouts which I also filmed (but didn't use). Many
| documentaries wouldn't count "just a player" as worth
| interviewing - Rob is proof that approach is short-sighted
| indeed.
|
| https://archive.org/details/getlamp-rgriffiths
|
| "I believe on one trip we were touring the MIT Artificial
| Intelligence Lab, and we saw some people gathered around this
| terminal. And we inquired what they were doing, and out of that
| came this game Zork, and my friend, since he was at MIT, had us
| get an account, and we were able to log in and figure out what to
| me looked like an extremely arcane set of commands to actually
| get this game running. From then on we were pretty much hooked
| from the first time we actually saw it. I believe we saw it when
| we were walking through the MIT AI Lab. I was a guest. Even back
| then there was some pretty amazing stuff in there. To see all
| these students and professors huddled around this terminal. What
| are the doing? They had all these incredibly cool Lisp Machines
| with big gorgeous displays, and a bunch of people were huddled
| around a machine that's got text. And we were sort of intrigued.
| I believe that was the first time I actually saw the game, so to
| speak. You know, I never got names, so I don't know. I was a
| petrified little 15-year-old kid walking around the MIT lab, so
| it was a bit of a feeling of "Am I supposed to be here?", and if
| I am supposed to be here, I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to
| talk, so perhaps I'll just be quiet and observe."
| DonHopkins wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33356932
|
| I deeply appreciate and am greatly privileged to benefit from the
| MIT AI Lab's "Tourist Policy" and general openness, generosity,
| and encouragement of education, which allowed me to use the lab's
| PDP-10s over the ARPANET as a high school student.
|
| I could connect remotely over the ARPANET by dialing up a local
| ARPANET TIP and connect to any computer without a password, then
| apply for a free account on each of the MIT-AI Lab's PDP-10s, by
| saying that I wanted to learn Lisp or MDL or Macsyma, and use the
| computers read email (mine and other people -- there was no file
| security and snooping was encouraged) and play games (like Zork,
| Adventure, Guess The Animal, and Doctor) after business hours.
|
| As a high school student living in Maryland, I'd occasionally go
| on a pilgrimage to MIT and visit the MIT-AI Lab at 545 Tech
| Square, the Media Lab, and other places on campus, including
| exploring the steam tunnels (like the ones depicted in Real
| Genius).
|
| They welcomed me to the lab, and I could easily get into the
| machine room and offices at the AI Lab simply by knocking on the
| door in the elevator lobby, and somebody using a Lisp Machine
| would press [Terminal]-D to automatically buzz open the door
| without getting up from their seat or looking who it was, just to
| make the knocking stop. (You could also press [Terminal]-E on a
| Lisp Machine to summon an elevator to your floor.) Then I could
| walk around the lab, and find a free Lisp Machine, Knight TV, or
| Ann Arbor Ambassador terminal to log in with, and even sleep on a
| bean bag chair or couch in an office, if it wasn't already
| occupied by RMS or some other random tourist or grad student.
|
| Members of the MIT-AI Lab would take the time to help and tutor
| me with Emacs and Lisp, invite me to go out and eat pot stickers
| and Suan La Chow Show at Mary Chung's and get ice cream at
| Toscanini's, encourage me to pick up free papers from the
| publications department, use the Dover laser printer and Velu
| Binder to print out and bind my own copies of the online ITS
| manuals and other documents (long before the consumer laser
| printers were available), and they'd even let me use the gigantic
| cappuccino machine (I heard one MIT grad student claim "I had
| offers from Harvard and Stanford, but I came here because of
| LCS's cappuccino machine!").
|
| [...]
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I've written about how the MIT machines were a nerd magnet for
| kids who had access to the ARPANET, and how I logged in over
| the ARPANET to play Zork:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15080221
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114927
|
| How ITS's open approach to security through obscurity
| encouraged hacking but discouraged vandalism because it really
| wasn't much of a challenge to break in or crash the machines:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22840639
|
| In my exploration of other people's home directories, I ran
| across an inexplicable (even to the author) TECO implementation
| of a Universal Turing Machine in Marvin Minsky's home directory
| "AI:MINSKY;":
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13519471
|
| Once my friend and I were hanging out in Norman Margolus's
| office with the lights out playing with his CAM-6 cellular
| automata machine, when his wife opened the door, turned on the
| light, and was surprised to see us there instead of her
| husband. She asked if we'd seen Norman, and we answered no,
| then she politely turned the lights back off and closed the
| door, leaving us to our fun.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14469113
|
| Keith F. Lynch wrote up some interesting history of the net and
| the MIT-AI Lab from his perspective:
|
| http://keithlynch.net/history.net.html
|
| How Jerry Pournelle got kicked off the ARPANET and MIT-AI Lab's
| computers for being an obnoxious antisocial unappreciative
| entitled drunken right-wing jackass, taking his unique precious
| privileges for granted while making impotent threats and
| accusing the same generous lab members who had welcomed,
| supported, and mentored him of being "communists":
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17686261
|
| >"One thing that is known about ARPA: you can be heaved off it
| for supporting the policies of the Department of Defense. Of
| course that was intended to anger me. If you have an ARPA
| account, please tell CSTACY that he was successful; now let us
| see if my Pentagon friends can upset him. Or perhaps some
| reporter friends. Or both., Or even the House Armed Services
| Committee." -POURNE (Jerry Pournelle)
|
| >"The man has learned nothing from his presence on MC and sets
| a bad example of what people might potentially accomplish
| there. I'd rather recycle his account for some bright 12-yr-
| old...)" -KMP (Kent Pitman)
|
| At the other end of the politeness spectrum, Rob Griffith's
| memories of touring the MIT-AI Lab and encountering Zork as a
| 15-year-old kid:
|
| https://archive.org/details/getlamp-rgriffiths
|
| >"I believe on one trip we were touring the MIT Artificial
| Intelligence Lab, and we saw some people gathered around this
| terminal. And we inquired what they were doing, and out of that
| came this game Zork, and my friend, since he was at MIT, had us
| get an account, and we were able to log in and figure out what
| to me looked like an extremely arcane set of commands to
| actually get this game running. From then on we were pretty
| much hooked from the first time we actually saw it. I believe
| we saw it when we were walking through the MIT AI Lab. I was a
| guest. Even back then there was some pretty amazing stuff in
| there. To see all these students and professors huddled around
| this terminal. What are the doing? They had all these
| incredibly cool Lisp Machines with big gorgeous displays, and a
| bunch of people were huddled around a machine that's got text.
| And we were sort of intrigued. I believe that was the first
| time I actually saw the game, so to speak. You know, I never
| got names, so I don't know. I was a petrified little 15-year-
| old kid walking around the MIT lab, so it was a bit of a
| feeling of "Am I supposed to be here?", and if I am supposed to
| be here, I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to talk, so perhaps
| I'll just be quiet and observe." -ROBG (Rob Griffith)
|
| https://archive.org/details/getlamp-rgriffiths
|
| MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy:
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/mit-ai-lab-tourist-policy-f73b...
|
| >MIT-MC PDP-10 at the MIT AI Lab:
|
| https://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/mc-console.jpg
|
| >Context
|
| >Excerpt from Free as in Freedom, Richard Stallman's Crusade
| for Free Software, by Sam Williams, March 2002, Chapter 7:
|
| https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch07.html
|
| >>Cadging passwords and deliberately crashing the system in
| order to glean evidence from the resulting wreckage, Stallman
| successfully foiled the system administrators' attempt to
| assert control. After one foiled "coup d'etat," Stallman issued
| an alert to the entire AI staff.
|
| >>"There has been another attempt to seize power," Stallman
| wrote. "So far, the aristocratic forces have been defeated." To
| protect his identity, Stallman signed the message "Radio Free
| OZ."
|
| >>The disguise was a thin one at best. By 1982, Stallman's
| aversion to passwords and secrecy had become so well known that
| users outside the AI Laboratory were using his account as a
| stepping stone to the ARPAnet, the research-funded computer
| network that would serve as a foundation for today's Internet.
| One such "tourist" during the early 1980s was Don Hopkins, a
| California [Maryland at the time, actually] programmer who
| learned through the hacking grapevine that all an outsider
| needed to do to gain access to MIT's vaunted ITS system was to
| log in under the initials RMS and enter the same three-letter
| monogram when the system requested a password.
|
| >>"I'm eternally grateful that MIT let me and many other people
| use their computers for free," says Hopkins. "It meant a lot to
| many people."
|
| >RMS Wondering Why You Wrap a Gerbil in Duct Tape
|
| https://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/jsol-rms-gerbil-l...
|
| >>This so-called "tourist" policy, which had been openly
| tolerated by MIT management during the ITS years, fell by the
| wayside when Oz became the lab's primary link to the ARPAnet.
| At first, Stallman continued his policy of repeating his login
| ID as a password so outside users could follow in his
| footsteps. Over time, however, the Oz's fragility prompted
| administrators to bar outsiders who, through sheer accident or
| malicious intent, might bring down the system. When those same
| administrators eventually demanded that Stallman stop
| publishing his password, Stallman, citing personal ethics,
| refused to do so and ceased using the Oz system altogether.
|
| >TOURIST POLICY AND RULES FOR TOURIST USE OF ITS MACHINES
|
| >It has been a long standing tradition at both the Laboratory
| for Computer Science and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
| at MIT to allow non-laboratory people to use the laboratories'
| computers during off hours. During the early days of the
| laboratories' existence a non-laboratory person (such people
| have come to be called tourists) could gain access to one of
| the computers by direct personal contact with a laboratory
| member. Furthermore, tourist access was controlled because
| access to the laboratories' computers was de facto achieved
| through on site terminals. A tourist sponsored by a laboratory
| member would generally receive some guidance and tutelage
| concerning acceptable behavior, proper design techniques for
| hardware and software, proper programming techniques, etc. The
| expectation on the laboratories' part was that a large
| percentage would become educated in the use of the advanced
| computing techniques developed and used in our laboratories and
| thereby greatly facilitate the technology transfer process. A
| second expectation was that some percentage would become
| interested and expert enough to contribute significantly to our
| research efforts. Tourists in this latter group would at some
| point in time graduate out of the tourist class and become
| laboratory members. In actual fact a number of former and
| present staff members and faculty earned their computational
| wings in just this fashion.
|
| [...]
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Consolidating everything on VAX might have been logical from a
| software support standpoint, but I increasingly think it was a
| serious mistake for DEC to not put out a faster PDP-10 variant in
| the early 80's. It might not have been hugely profitable, but
| there was a market -- no less than three separate companies
| attempted to sell clones.
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| Quite simply, the VAX group won. Marketing believed two product
| lines competing in the same space with incompatible software
| would not be in DEC's best interests.
|
| As I worked in the -10 group as a coop, I was bummed to hear
| that decision. However, the more I used the VAX, the more I
| realized it was, in fact, a better foundation for the 80s and
| beyond. The -10 is cool, tho. Very cool.
| drfuchs wrote:
| Tell me it can also boot WAITS (ala SAIL) and I'll buy one.
| shrubble wrote:
| It is claimed that the simulator will run WAITS, though in what
| condition, is not clear: https://gunkies.org/wiki/WAITS
| WalterBright wrote:
| Empire for the PDP-10 is still available! Fair warning, it can
| suck up all your free time and then some. People have told me it
| has caused them to flunk out of college and even resulted in
| divorces. Use at your own risk!
|
| https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10
| smegsicle wrote:
| like we need another a low budget civ ripoff
| jerf wrote:
| Learn your history before shooting your mouth off. Empire
| predates Civilization by 14 years. Which you might have
| realized if you thought about it being PDP-10 software.
|
| "According to Meier, his Civilization actually started as a
| glorified version of a favorite childhood board game. "It was
| kind of like Risk brought to life on the computer," muses
| Meier. "That was the original idea. And then we added the
| technology and the whole sense of history to it." Meier was
| also a big fan of an early computer game called Empire, which
| combined Risk-like world domination with intricate city
| management. "At one point, [Meier] asked me to make a list of
| 10 things I would do to Empire to make it a better game,"
| says Shelley. "That was some of his research on
| Civilization."" - https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-
| history-of-civiliza...
| cduzz wrote:
| I read that as sarcasm.
|
| The grand-parent of this comment implemented empire on the
| PC, and is responsible for me getting poor grades in high
| school biology. I even bought a V20 CPU so my hand-me-down
| PC (5150) could build empire maps 30 seconds faster...
|
| I've gotten both my kids hooked on civilization but haven't
| gotten them into empire (or nethack). (yet)
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