Talk:PDP-10

message: The statement that "Infocom used several PDP-10s for game development and testing" should probably have a reference attached
to it or be removed. It seems somewhat unlikely that they would keep a number of mainframes running for that purpose. --Khim1 (talk) 06:07, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: Infocom

message: Does anyone have any information about the speed of these machines? (84.78.203.218 (talk) 21:52, 4 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Characteristics

message: According to Tom Knight:
: Holloway designed the pager for ITS long before Tenex existed.  They asked us what instructions we used, so that the XCTR instruction is semi-compatible, at least in opcode.
in case anyone wants to know what the support data is for this claim. Noel 12:50, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: MIT and BBN KA-10 pagers

message: From the article "with automated wire-wrap back panels."  The back panels would be more properly called backplanes and they were made with a semi-automated process.  
The backplane was positioned in front of an assembler.  Between the assembler and the backplane was an arm running on an X-Y positioning system.   The arm had a V-shaped groove on its end.  The operator would touch a foot pedal and the arm would move to the coordinates of the first wire-wrap pin. At the same time, a lamp would light above one of many bins of different lengths of precut and stripped wire.  She would take a length of wire, insert it into her wire wrap gun, place the gun onto the pin pointed to by the arm and install the wire.  She would then touch the foot pedal again and the arm would move to the wire endpoint where she would secure it.  She would repeat the process until the backplane was done. 
I don't know if any of this is relevant to the article.  Someone might find it useful.  I'd like to change back panels to backplanes and automated to semi-automated if there are no objections.  
I'd also point out the the phrase Wire-Wrap is a trademark of what was then Gardner-Denver, now Cooper Group and as such should at least be capitalized and hyphenated. -- Grumpyoldgeek 17:33, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Automated wire-wrap did exist.  I don't know whether DEC used automated or semi-automated.  "Panel" was standard terminology for something you wire-wrapped; in this case I think either term is acceptable, but backplane is probably slightly more meaningful.  --Brouhaha 07:46, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: "Automated wire-wrap did exist."  No doubt. OTOH, what I described is the way the machines were built at the Mill in 1972 and that's what the article discusses. I spent several lunch breaks watching and chatting with the assemblers as they wired the backplanes. --Grumpyoldgeek 17:33, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Wire wrap panels

message: Can we see about getting some free-use images of PDP-10 and assorted goodies?  Anyone have any to share?  /Blaxthos 03:07, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Go ahead! as they say, Be Bold! Kay Dekker (talk) 12:19, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Images

message: The page introduction says "The first model was delivered in 1966", while the first section of the article says "The original PDP-10 processor was the KA10, introduced in 1968".  Can someone with access to contemporary records provide an unambiguous timeline?  If those two dates had been reversed, I might suspect that the product was announced in one year, then delivered two years later, but the current text precludes that interpretation.  4.248.218.255 (talk) 11:42, 26 September 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: This PDP_Tree_Poster_1980.jpg published by Gordon Bell suggests that 1966 is the better choice.--Jkbw (talk) 01:50, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
replies: text:  This document from one of the engineers involved making the PDP-10 says the first successful power on test was in March 1967. Lars Brinkhoff (talk) 10:45, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dates 

message: who are/were BBN? The link to BBN needs to be targeted correctlyCecilWard (talk) 15:09, 1 March 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: In case anyone else is still interested in this old question, there is an article on Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, although the name of the company has changed in the decades since they helped create the ARPAnet.   Unician ∇  16:04, 17 June 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  BBN 

message: IIRC, asynchronous serial communications (for terminal displays, printers, and modems) was handled by the PDP-11/40 front-end in behalf of the KL10 processor. The MassBus channel was used for disk and tape transfers, and was connected directly to a controller on the KL10, bypassing the front-end. As of this writing, the article glosses over the I/O architecture and data paths, and doesn't mention async serial communications at all. I don't have access to the tech ref manuals any more, so this is just my recollection from managing a KL10 installation a quarter-century ago. If somebody has a clear diagram of the basic data paths, adding it to the article would make this more understandable.  Reify-tech (talk) 03:49, 27 September 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds fine to me, but that still leaves the I/O paths for the KA10, KI10, and KS10 to write about. Do all interrupt on every character of serial I/O? Gah4 (talk) 01:49, 29 September 2015 (UTC)
replies: text:  That would depend on the serial interface in question. The DZ11, an early Unibus multiport serial interface, did have some small FIFO buffers for both transmit and recieve, much like an 8250 or 16550 (if I remember those numbers correctly), so even the poor beleagured 11/40 was not coping with an interrupt per character except for manually-typed input... which would generally be too slow for those interrupts to matter much. I don't know if they had similarly FIFOd serial interfaces for the earlier Kx10's. But certainly it was possible to build FIFO-equipped serial interfaces even in those primitive times. :) Jeh (talk) 01:54, 29 September 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Communications I/O and data paths 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: A small point.  The section on the KA10 says "...were modified to add virtual memory and support for demand paging, as well as more physical memory."  But the KA10 did offer virtual memory, but not paged virtual memory.  Using the twoseg memory management in tops-10 memory was virtual, user accesses where translated on each reference, users could swap to and from disk/drum, total allocated user memory could exceed physical. I edited the sentence to say "...were modified to support demand paged virtual memory, as well as more physical memory."  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 73.238.3.45 (talk) 20:54, 18 June 2018 (UTC (UTC)
:I guess it depends on the definition of "virtual memory".  If it's defined as "addresses within the program aren't physical addresses, thre's a map between program addresses and physical addresses", then it's virtual memory.  If, however, it's defined as "parts of the address space can be marked as not present in physical memory, and a reference to an address in one of those parts will cause a trap, and the trap handler can bring the data into physical memory, map it in, and restart the trapping instruction, so that the program can, modulo the performance hit, act as if the entire address space were in physical memory", then it's not virtual memory, unlike demand-paged or demand-segmen-loaded systems. (Swapping doesn't count here, as the address space is either entirely swapped in or entirely swapped out, modulo shared segments - in order to run, the entire address space, not just the parts currently being used, must be in physical memory.) Guy Harris (talk) 06:59, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: The KA10 had address translation. This provided memory protection.  It had a two-segment memory model that meant the (typically but not necessarily read only) high segment could be shared by multiple users and the low segment of a user moved out to disk.  Fractional demand management isn't a requirement of virtual memory.  It was a later refinement.  You can reference Wikipedia's own definition of virtual memory.  It was virtual memory. 149.32.192.48 (talk) 12:28, 30 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  KA10 and Non Paged Virtual Memory 

message: I don't want to join any edit war, but from minicomputer it should cost less than $25K in 1970, and I don't believe that was true for the PDP-10.  Smaller DEC systems were close to the beginning of the minicomputer market, and VAX was sold as supermini.  Note that the VAX is much more powerful than the low end of the IBM S/360 line, which we always considered mainframes.  (Well, maybe not the 360/20, but at least down to the 360/30.) More than the CPU itself, it is the peripherals that you attach.  Minicomputers might have one disk drive, or maybe none, but mainframes would have many of them. Gah4 (talk) 21:01, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that the PDP-10 was not a minicomputer. DEC never marketed it as a minicomputer, and frequently referred to it as a mainframe computer. Reify-tech (talk) 21:07, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: The KS-10 might qualify, though. Gah4 (talk) 21:24, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: sigh---All right, I give up; maybe I was confusing it with the PDP-11, which definitely is a 16-bit minicomputer. I give up. JustinTime55 (talk) 21:50, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for conceding your major error. By contrast, the PDP-11 was considered a minicomputer. Several of the editors of this article have worked on both families of DEC hardware; I myself have been  responsible for managing PDP-11s, a DECsystem 2065, VAXes, and various other DEC hardware. Reify-tech (talk) 22:06, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: The PDP-6/10 and the PDP-11 are very different machines. The 10 had 18-bit word addressing (~ 1mbyte memory); the 11 had 16-bit byte addressing (64k memory). The 10 was much bigger physically and much more expensive. The 10 was installed in machine rooms, the 11 was often used in lab or school spaces. In fact, in the Gordon Bell article referenced by our article, he explicitly contrasts the PDP-10 to DEC's minicomputers, though he never uses the term "mainframe". The PDP-11 was in fact used as a front-end console machine for some of the PDP-10 line (KL-10). Like Reify-tech, I used 10's, 11's, and Vaxes in the day, as well as the SDS-940 (a mainframe limited to 200kbytes!), GE-635, Honeywell/GE-645/6180, IBM 360 before PCs and workstations came along. --Macrakis (talk) 23:19, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[minicomputer]] 

message: This was removed from the article.  I am putting it here in case anyone wants to find references and put it back:
:== In popular culture ==
*Swordfish – Hugh Jackman's character accesses "The only PDP10 active and on the internet" which is in the basement of a Caltech building where he hides his worm creation program.
*The Americans season 2, episode 7 ("Arpanet") – Kate relays orders for Philip to bug the PDP10 based ARPANET, which he accomplishes with the help of Duluth.
: Adding a few more. Lars Brinkhoff (talk) 11:48, 23 August 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: The first two look completely incidental and unnecessary. Hackers and Hacker's Dictionary are almost entirely about ITS (and maybe SAIL) PDP-10s, not PDP-10s in general. So I don't think any of those belongs here. After all, the article already links to hacker culture. --Macrakis (talk) 23:13, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

text: Music video with CCRMA PDP-6 and Foonly (F2 or F4):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs6iMer68co Lars Brinkhoff (talk) 11:29, 13 February 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Amusing, but obviously not relevant to the article. --Macrakis (talk) 16:54, 13 February 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Popular culture that needs citations? 

message: Hack-hack
 Jamplevia (talk) 01:15, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Foo