Hunting two PDP-1 photos (which are not what they seem) | Hacker News Reader

Hunting two PDP-1 photos (which are not what they seem)

masswerk.at

95 pointsmasswerk30 comments

My guess is it was a figure in this article: https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an/1988/04/man1988040...

Edit: Confirmed, kind of. A similar but different picture is figure 9: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Historical-Overview-...

It looks like the picture slated for figure 11, that made it to the CHM archives, didn't actually end up in the article.

This photo, also in the CHM archive but not digitized, is probably of the same layout / computer: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10275791...

The title attribution poses another riddle: "PDP-1/B and miniature model railroad at University of Massachusetts".

The PDP-1B was the production prototype of the PDP-1 and there were only 2, we know of. The first one (white) was intended for LLNL, but the order got delayed and it went to BBN instead, the second one (blue) became the actual LLNL machine.

Update: Curiously, the this page [1] also mentions a "PDP-lB" [sic!]:

[1] https://www.cics.umass.edu/about/history-school-computer-sci...

Anyway, this seems to confirm the Amherst link already suggested by Steve Russell.

Good article... it points out that J.A.N. Lee was appointed Program Head of the new CS program at UMassAmherst in September of 1964. And that is the same person whom the 2nd photo was from in the thread’s main article.

That does look correct, great find.

Unless things have changed it would be unusual to refer to the University of Massachusetts as UM. I grew up in MA and have only ever heard it called UMass. It's possible it used to be called UM before they expanded it beyond Amherst and Boston.

Thank you very much, I will update the article accordingly!

Edit: Updated! – Now a legit HN success story. :-)

The article, without the paywall:

https://sci-hub.se/10.1109/MAHC.1988.10039

It downloads very slowly, for me. Be patient. UPDATE: literally 56KB/s, and 34 megabytes. The fastest modems used to be 8x slower that that!

I keep eyeballing the railroad track but that feels like HO and not O guage.

The track spacing doesn’t look right for O, also in 1961 im not sure two rail O gauge would be common... O usually has a third rail.

Could also be OO gauge, but that is rare in the US.

If that's the model railroad from the MIT ain't it a completely custom railroad, unique to the MIT? So it could even be none of those?

"Model railroad" would suggest a [scale] model of some extent railway, otherwise isn't it just railway/railroad without the "model" designation. If it's not modelled on something isn't it properly a toy or miniature railway. /pedantry

Here is a Wired article (2014) on the TMRC with photos of the actual layout: https://www.wired.com/2014/11/the-tech-model-railroad-club/

OO is just a slightly bigger scale (1:76) at H0 track. Since UK loading diameter is slightly narrower than on other standard gauge railways (which is the reason for there being OO at all, as H0 motors wouldn't fit models of UK locomotives), there wouldn't be much of a noticeable difference. To me, this looks bigger than H0, but there are other scales and gauges, as well. Admittedly, my knowledge about these is pretty limited.

Definitely not O, HO stands for 'half O', and OO is/was pretty rare outside of the UK, I'd bet on HO.

Yes, not OO. There were probably no such US coaches available in OO.

And O would be way larger:

http://wgh.trains.com/-/media/Images/How%20To/Articles/ABCs%...

There is also S scale between HO and O, which I believe was still popular at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_scale

It's definitely an American HO scale layout. The track looks like Atlas and I recognize several of the buildings as HO-scale Revell kits that were popular at the time.

CORRECTIONS TO ARTICLE:

1. In the first sentence of the section Timeline, "delvired" should be "delivered".

2. The URL to this HN discussion at the end of the article is incorrectly syntaxed and gives 404.

Thanks, corrected.

I have the say the computers in these photos look awesome. Much nicer than today's day designs. Looks quite modern again :)

What is a grade student?

a grad student with an e added to the grad, I think.

Meanwhile, something dutifully corrected. :-)

Delivered is misspelled as well, if you’re looking for typos.

Thanks for the interesting piece.

A well, not a native speaker, sleepless night… but I do apologize for this being interesting! ;-)

Why did grown men play with model trains back then?

They still do and these clubs are very well known in the history of tech.

http://tmrc.mit.edu

Well for one thing grown people play with all sorts of things. Boats are also quite popular, not just real ones but model ones.

Also there were more "group" activities in those days (consider Moose and Elk lodges and other societies, of which only a few really survive any more).

As far as trains specifically: For a long time trains were the definitional high tech artifacts; my dad bought me a train set (I was born in the early 60s) and though I thought it was merely OK, he, being from the 1930s, remembered trains as super exciting.

Plus it's one of those activities with a gajillion degrees of freedom (mechanical, artistic, electrical, mathematical) which encourages groups of people to work together on the pieces that appeal to them.

Why shouldn't they?

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