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This was the first computer I ever seriously programmed on. You could load values into registers by toggling the switches on the front and hitting 'load'.
But it was smell of these machines almost overwhelmed me. That's how computers are supposed to smell. If you're of a certain age, you know what I'm talking about.
This is a PiDP-11, a functional replica of the 1970s PDP-11, a minicomputer of the 1970s. It is a really nice bliken light machine with a great design.
The replica can be obtained here (in case you are lucky)
obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11
The PDP-11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a set of products in the Programmed Data Processor (PDP) series. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of all models were sold, making it one of DEC's most successful product lines. The PDP-11 is considered by some experts to be the most popular minicomputer.
01433_DxO_1200
Zeitpunkt Aufnahme: 2013:05:11 16:29
Belichtung 1/40
Blende f/ 4.0
Brennweite 45 mm
Digital Equipment Corporation
Eingeführt wurde die PDP-11-Baureihe im Jahr 1970.
Die PDP-11 hat eine Wortbreite von 16 bit. Es werden Einadressbefehle, Zweiadressbefehle und Sprünge unterschieden. Die Adressierung erfolgt jeweils über sechs Bit, wobei die ersten drei Bit für die acht Adressierungsmodi verwendet werden und die letzten drei für die Auswahl eines der acht Register (R0 bis R7). Viele Befehle gibt es als Wortbefehle und als Bytebefehle, das heißt, sie operieren mit 16-Bit- bzw. 8-Bit-Einheiten.
This is the desk where I learned (?) digital image processing. The central monitor was connected to a powerful 128x128 bytes video Ram.
Behind the window a gorgeous PDP11/45 with magnetic cores memory was doing the tasks.
Photoshop was simpliy science fiction.
The image above shows a class 40, number unidentifiable unfortunately, taken passing south on the West Coast Main Line and close to the Radio Telescope at Jodrell Bank. I took the shot sometime in 1971 or 1972 and during the time in which the Lovell Telescope, as it ultimately became known, was being up-graded from the Mk1 to the Mk1A. I have no recollection of the circumstances now and it was to be another 10 years before I finally arrived there to undertake work for an M.Sc. in Radio Astronomy. By which time it had undergone further changes and a new 'Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network', 'MERLIN', was being brought on-line, this was in 1981. It was also the period in which personal computers and faster, more compact processing power were coming into being and the antiquated CDC7600, at the Physics Dept, used to process Radio data, was finally being phased out. The prior age was that of the Westrex Teletype, familiar to those who used to watch the TV football results on Saturday, paper-tape roll programming and, large, 12inch disks of, wait for it, 10Mby, not Gby, capacity, housed in large plastic containers, with handles! and which cost hundreds of pounds. The main memory of the system I subsequently operated in the mid-1980s, had a massive 64 Kilobytes of memory, split into two sections; one for the system and one for the user's programmes, this was a PDP11 and was junior fellow to the much larger VAX/VMS machine, it took a while to fathom out what those letters meant but eventually got it; Virtual Address eXchange/Virtual Memory System. This indicated that the system and user memory could be swapped in and out to/from the disk array, by this time there was more than one disk. This technique of swapping contents of memory to the disk, is now what Windows and other PC/Solaris/Linux type operating systems use, though these days, as memory is so cheap, its not really required _unless_ the machine has limited memory; my PC has 12Gby of fast RAM, Random Access Memory, that's 12,000,000, Kilobytes! The SATA disks I have are 2+4+2 Terabytes, that's 2 and 4,000,000Mby; 'things' have certainly moved on vastly since then. See-
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodrell_Bank_Observatory
The Lovell 250' diameter dish subsequently had even more of those upgrades, and is now set to work on for years to come; a long-time testament to the faith and perseverance of Sir Bernard Lovell who was the chief instigator in getting the largest, fully-steerable Radio Telescope in the world, constructed and completed in time, as it turned out, for the passage overhead of the very 1st satellite in orbit, the Russian Sputnik launch in 1959..
This image has been used, partly as it came to light this last week during a look through the slide collection I have from the late 60s to the mid-90s, after which photographs became much cheaper to obtain via the postal companies such as 'BonusPrint' & 'TruPrint'. The shot was mounted in a blue/white Agfa CT18 slide mount, though I am uncertain as to whether this was the film used, though it is amongst other shot at the same time in the frames which Agfa used at that time. The camera would have been a simple affair, a Russian Zenit-E with a decent, Helios lens, film was CT18 rated at 64ASA and as the 40 looks in focus I guess a shutter speed of 1/125th or faster. The tall crane and super-structure of the Telescope are also reasonably in focus so I guess, f/8, probably, all seems fairly standard in those days. The shot was in colour but is now so blue its pointless posting the colour version, all-in-all not a bad shot, the number of the 40 is tantalisingly out-of-focus but could end in a 6, no split headcode box and with a single white lower disk visible, indicating a class 0, or light engine move. The loco is obviously in British Rail Blue livery with yellow front panel and with the InterCity 'Double-Arrow', 'This is the Age of the Train', logo on the cab side. I am afraid I can't say more about the picture than this as I have no notes available nor is there any indication of the exact date and time of the shot. The refurbishment of the Mk1 to the Mk1A occured in the years indicated, see-
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovell_Telescope
and I was certainly around in this area, living on Central Road in West Didsbury, south of Manchester City, between September 1970 and July 1974.
The other reason this image has been used, is that the second of the ‘Views-in-Camera 2020’ Archives has now been completed, containing the other 721 images which were left after the recent deletion and tidying up of the work from the last 10 years. This picture is therefore being used as a bit of a 'celebration' for having completed all the changes to the Flickr presence since the beginning of this year. So, as indicated earlier the 1st Image Archive site with 995 images-
from 10/5/2011 to 1/6/2016, is now complete and the second with 721 images-
hosting images from 3/6/2016 to 9/4/2018, is also now complete and there remains space for another 279, which will be added in the near future.
And finally, the remainder of the most recent set, selected from 8th October 2011 to 21st February 2020, a total of 992 images, are still on the old 'Views in Camera' site-
www.flickr.com/photos/daohaiku
which was complete earlier this year.
(Project 365 Day 93, Bonus 2)
I was amused by how much the PDP-11 console's color scheme reminded me of the UI from Stark Trek: The Next Generation. :P (From the Computer History Museum.)
The Museum and its hardware. Still work in progress, a nice improvement compared to a few weeks ago, thanks to a lot of hackerspace dwellers who helped out. An awesome upgrade comparing to when we first moved in and the previous hackerspace location.
Die Ansteuerung der LEDs macht übrigens ein kleiner Linux-Rechner (single board), Details dazu hier: retrocmp.com/projects/blinkenbone
A Casio pocket computer (with the BASIC language) and its Soviet clone.
The Elektronika MK-85 was designed to have a look and a human interface near exactly the same as the FX-700P.
However, the FX-700P is a calculator but the MK-85 is a PDP-11 compatible computer (not a PDP-11 clone as the chip design was an original Soviet work).
This, of course, means that the Soviet one is heavier and it used more energy. It is also slower in the basic mode (I don't have tried the "turbo" mode as there is no power adapter available). Anyway the Soviet model has graphical functions and Russiian alphabet output that the original machine don't have.
The first sign of a bad C439 is a vertical stripe on the left side of the screen. More info: trmm.net/VT100
Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at a pretty well maxed out DEC PDP11 computer and two Teletype model 33 terminals.
See Unix's timeline at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix
See Unix's story at Bell Labs: www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/ GONE 5-2022
See Unix's evolution at: cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/hist.html GONE 5-2022
For those interested in telephone related uses of Unix see below:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switching_Control_Center_System
And: viswiki.com/en/Switching_Control_Center_System GONE 5-2022
The Museum and its hardware. Still work in progress but an awesome upgrade comparing to when we first moved in and the previous hackerspace location.
Cheshire's PDP-11. The cabinet claims it's a PDP-11/03, but it has been long since upgraded with a CPU from a PDP-11/73. I believe it has 4 MB of RAM (which would be the limit due to the 22 bit address bus on the QBUS and the J-11 CPU chip set), but the architecture limits the address space of any single process to only 64 KB. My first introduction to an MMU was to divide a large physical address into many small logical addresses. These days, MMUs are usually used the other way around.
It was originally put into service in 1983 and is still operational. It runs the TSX-11 timesharing system over an RT-11 kernel.
Also on the QBUS are a pair of third party co-processor boards, each with 4MB of linear addressed DRAM, one with an intel 80486 (the XP-11) and the other with a Motorola 88000 (sometimes known as the YP-11). We used a Greenhills C compiler hosted on the co-processor to build utilities that needed larger address spaces as well as more raw CPU power.
Also in the rack are 5.5" and 8" floppy drives, the hard drive, and a 9 track tape drive. The whole thing would fit in one 4foot tall rack, but we got a good deal on two...
The minitower sharing the hollow at the right is a Pentium 2 PC running Win2K.
The lower right corner is missing because this photo has been substantially corrected for perspective in Photoshop and the pixels just weren't present in the original image. The alternative would have been to change lenses to something wider so that I could have put the camera directly in front of the rack, but it isn't in a very large room and the wide angle lens I have available is a lot slower than the 50 I used for this shot.
D70s, 50mm f/1.8D. 1/160 s at f/1.8 and ISO 800. Shot RAW, adjusted for white and exposure tweaking in LR, substantially edited in CS2.
Our second PDP-11/34, with RL02 and RK05 interface cards. no cache. Also has a Versatek analog input card.
Trying to input the Moscow Nights melody (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Nights) into the Elektronika MK-90 computer (PDP-11 compatlble portable machine with a clone of DEC BASIC interpreter..., ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%AD%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%82%D1%8...).
The program was included as an example in the original manual (the right page on the picture).
Soviet monsters... Both are portable, by the way. The MK-92 docking station can work on batteries, too.
Documation was the OEM that produced this card reader in 1978. DEC re-badged the machine and sold it as the CR-11.
Stoneshop is explaining Carola Houtekamer, the visiting NRC Next reporter, the history and workings of the PDP-11 minicomputer.
An overhead shot, which turned out okay.