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- Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
- Path: sparky!uunet!usc!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!news.columbia.edu!watsun.cc.columbia.edu!lasner
- From: lasner@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Charles Lasner)
- Subject: Re: PDP ftp archive
- Message-ID: <1992Nov22.114337.15485@news.columbia.edu>
- Sender: usenet@news.columbia.edu (The Network News)
- Nntp-Posting-Host: watsun.cc.columbia.edu
- Reply-To: lasner@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Charles Lasner)
- Organization: Columbia University
- References: <13632@ecs.soton.ac.uk> <1992Nov20.142937.9123@news.uiowa.edu> <1992Nov21.003656.17491@leland.Stanford.EDU>
- Date: Sun, 22 Nov 1992 11:43:37 GMT
- Lines: 40
-
- In article <1992Nov21.003656.17491@leland.Stanford.EDU> alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson) writes:
-
- >> PDP-6 36 DEC's first really big computer.
- >
- > (only 23 were ever built, cause KO hated
- > big MIS-type machines)
-
- I heard it was 20, not 23.
-
- >> PDP-10 1967 36 A PDP-6 upgrade, great timesharing.
- >
- > Not exactly--more a revival.
-
- Upgrade is an unfortunate word. I think the reference is to the fact that
- they are instruction-set compatible, and that time-sharing didn't really
- happen on a -6.
-
- > Hmmph. Leave it to the 12-bit crowd to get it wrong.
-
- Not as far wrong as these guys posting about "PDP's" as if -11's are the
- only kind!
-
- >
- > The DEC-20 is the outgrowth of a smart decision by DEC: License the
- > TENEX operating system written for the Dec-10 by Bolt, Beranek, and
- > Newman, which featured real demand-paged virtual memory, and sell it
- > as an *alternative to*, not a replacement for, Tops-10, which was the
- > descendant of the *batch-processing* operating system on the PDP-6 and
- > early PDP-10s.
-
- But the -20 *is* a -10. What's the difference between a KL-10 and the
- high-end -20, the color of the cabinet? Yes, you don't run TOPS-20 on
- a KA-10, but a KL can be called anything you want. The point is that model
- numbers can be muddled, and clearly marketroids are the source of the
- muddling. Calling them all -10's would've been fine, but...
-
- Also, what about the ill-fated Jupiter? Wasn't that to be "doubled" again
- and be renamed DECsystem-40?
-
- cjl
-