page_title: PDP-10
hierarchical_section_title: PDP-10
caption_attribution_description: English: DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) PDP-10 CPU, model KI-10
context_page_description: Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especially as the TOPS-10 operating system became widely used.
  The PDP-10's architecture is almost identical to that of DEC's earlier PDP-6, sharing the same 36-bit word length and slightly extending the instruction set. Some aspects of the instruction set are unusual, most notably the byte instructions, which operated on bit fields of any size from 1 to 36 bits inclusive, according to the general definition of a byte as a contiguous sequence of a fixed number of bits.
  The PDP-10 is the machine that made time-sharing common, and this and other features made it a common fixture in many university computing facilities and research labs during the 1970s, the most notable being Harvard University's Aiken Computation Laboratory, MIT's AI Lab and Project MAC, Stanford's SAIL, Computer Center Corporation, ETH, and Carnegie Mellon University. Its main operating systems, TOPS-10 and TENEX, were used to build out the early ARPANET.
context_section_description: Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especially as the TOPS-10 operating system became widely used.
  The PDP-10's architecture is almost identical to that of DEC's earlier PDP-6, sharing the same 36-bit word length and slightly extending the instruction set (but with improved hardware implementation). Some aspects of the instruction set are unusual, most notably the byte instructions, which operated on bit fields of any size from 1 to 36 bits inclusive, according to the general definition of a byte as a contiguous sequence of a fixed number of bits.
  The PDP-10 is the machine that made time-sharing common, and this and other features made it a common fixture in many university computing facilities and research labs during the 1970s, the most notable being Harvard University's Aiken Computation Laboratory, MIT's AI Lab and Project MAC, Stanford's SAIL, Computer Center Corporation (CCC), ETH (ZIR), and Carnegie Mellon University. Its main operating systems, TOPS-10 and TENEX, were used to build out the early ARPANET. For these reasons, the PDP-10 looms large in early hacker folklore.
  Projects to extend the PDP-10 line were eclipsed by the success of the unrelated VAX superminicomputer, and the cancellation of the PDP-10 line was announced in 1983.
caption: Working DEC KI-10 System at Living Computers: Museum + Labs
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