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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

The alpha was a screamer, that’s for sure. This article ignores another influential architecture that arose from Gordon Bell’s 18-bit PDP-1: the 36-bit PDP-6 that turned into the 36-bit “mini mainframe” PDP-10 and later -20 series that were the default research machines for major research universities corporate research labs, and in particular ARPANET development. In fact network byte order is big endian because these machines were.

The PDPD-10s were also the first “lisp machines”: two 18-bit addresses fit in a single machine word, and several lisp primitives were single instructions. The instruction set was compact, regular, and fun to program in.

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Empire for the PDP-10!

https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10

Dude, my GPA seriously suffered when we got Empire running on USC-ECLC (the DEC KI-10 that was running TENEX at the time, later upgraded to a KL-10 model B and TOPS20).

So thanks for that. :-)

Empire has the dubious distinction of causing many divorces and flunk-outs.

Not sure "upvote" is the correct response here but it's the only one I have :-)

What is Empire? Is it a video game? I only know it as a post exploitation tool.

https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10/blob/master...

Thank you

http://classicempire.com/

Thanks for a great game! Used to play MSDOS Empire frequently back in the day. I actually started work on an Empire clone/derivative with network multiplayer support (a challenge for a turn-based game like Empire, but I'm borrowing ideas from Warlight - an network multiplayer version of Risk).

Pretty sure the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_704 was the first Lisp machine (as CAR, CDR come from register names on the 704...)

But DEC did rule academic computing well into the 80s.

Yes, I believe it was the first machine Lisp ran on though that was before my time.

But the PDP-6 was a different class of device as every machine word was (could store) a cons; the common list manipulation functions (not just car and cdr but rplaca et al) were actual machine instructions etc (even if the names were different, e.g. CAR was HLRZ, as I can still remember).

In other words, lisp was implemented _on_ the IBM machine while the design of the 6/10 architecture was influenced by the needs of lisp. Both Marvin and Gordon independently confirmed this to me.

The Alpha team was lead by Daniel Dobberpuhl who started PA-Semi, later acquired by Apple. So this new M1 chip is a direct descendant of the Alpha..

I was not aware of that. Interesting!

Is it, though? Can anyone compare/contrast the 2 designs? Just because the same people work on them, doesn't mean they're necessarily related (Alpha vs ARM).

Dave Cutler worked on VMS and NT and as far as I know NT is quite different, for example.

They were not very different under the hood. In fact, many units within the OS were similarly/equally named. The UI was a different beast all together and I remember the UI crashing in WinNT 3.51 while the kernel and services were happily chugging along.

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