On Tue, 15 Mar 2022 11:45:44 +1300, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'The PDP-11 was introduced in 1970 ...'
The first computer I was actually able to touch and run code on was a PDP-11/34 at Waikato Uni in 1979. It was running a “cafeteria system” where you put your program (written in Waterloo Fortran, “WATFOR”) on mark-sense cards (punch cards where you put black marks instead of making holes), then stood in line to feed your deck through the reader, then wait for the printer to print your program listing (including compiler syntax errors) and (if you were lucky) output. The main University system was a PDP-11/70 running RSTS/E, which was an interactive timesharing system. The following year, they got their first VAX. The PDP-11 is known as the birthplace of Unix in (approximately) its production form. Though a prototype was previously put together on an old PDP-7, which was a machine with a very different architecture, with an 18-bit word and no hardware stack. This guy has done a brief overview of the major DEC PDP lines <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQUeMyAMQwo>, ending by putting together a “PiDP-11” PDP-11 emulator built around a Raspberry π. The PDP-10 was also an interesting family of machines, very much in the “mainframe” class at the time. These were used to develop two influential operating systems of the 1970s: TENEX from BBN and ITS (“Incompatible Timesharing System”) from the MIT AI Lab.