The PDP-10 was not a mini-computer for which PDPs are generally associated with, but instead it was a mainframe and had a 36-bit word. The switches were coloured in sets of three to aid in entering octal data (as opposed to hexadecimal).
Sorry, I meant objectively better in an absolute sense. Just that it's not like the -11 is a sequel to the -10 like a 486 to a 386 is. But you are absolutely right, there are definite strengths of each platform from an enthusiast perspective.
It's, shall we say, delightfully weird in its support of bytes and half-words (addresses).
Also: having 256K words is much better than 64 KB.
https://github.com/PDP-10/documents/blob/master/mirror/www.i...
Byte instructions
In the PDP-10 a "byte" is some number of contiguous bits within one
word. A byte pointer is a quantity (which occupies a whole word)
which describes the location of a byte. There are three parts to the
description of a byte: the word (i.e., address) in which the byte
occurs, the position of the byte within the word, and the length of
the byte.
A byte pointer has the following format:
000000 000011 1 1 1111 112222222222333333
012345 678901 2 3 4567 890123456789012345
_________________________________________
| | | | | | |
| POS | SIZE |U|I| X | Y |
|______|______|_|_|____|__________________|
POS is the byte position: the number of bits from the right end of
the byte to the right end of the word.
SIZE is the byte size in bits.
The U field is ignored by the byte instructions.
The I, X and Y fields are used, just as in an instruction, to compute
an effective address which specifies the location of the word
containing the byte.
Here are the byte instructions.
[...] LDB DPB IBP ILDB IDPB [...]
Text strings are typically stored using seven-bit bytes, five per
word. ILDB and IDPB can then be used to step through a string. The
byte pointer should be initialized to 440700,,<address of string>.
Then the first ILDB will increment it to point at the first character
of the string.Roughly speaking true but not exactly. The PDP-12 and the PDP-14 were both released in 1969 whereas the PDP-11 wasn’t released until 1970. Also, both the PDP-11 and the PDP-15 were released in 1970, but I’m not sure which was released first. Even if it so happens the PDP-11 came out earlier in 1970 than the PDP-15 did, that fact is irrelevant to their numbering.
https://github.com/rcornwell/sims/tree/master?tab=readme-ov-...
From the GitHub entry: The KA10 sim has successfully run Tops 10 4.5, 5.03 and 6.03, ITS and WAITS. The KI10 sim has successfully run Tops 10 6.03 with VMSER. The KL10 sim has successfully run Tops 10 6.03-7.03, ITS and Tops 20 V2-V7. The KS10 sim has successfully run Tops 10, Tops 20 and ITS.
PiDP-10 can run a variety of PDP-10 operating systems, although the front-panel is specific to the early KA10 model.
"IF YOUR COMPUTER DOES NOT HAVE 36 BITS, YOU'RE NOT PLAYING WITH A FULL DEC..." -- attributed to Doug Humphrey (DIGEX) trolling the 32 bit VAX Weenies at DECUS.
https://techsquare.myspreadshop.com/36-bit+full+dec-A64fef41...
The LMI Lisp Machines Inc. one is quite classy (or rather flavory) too:
https://techsquare.myspreadshop.com/lisp+machine+inc-A6417f5...
And a lot more, including Zork, INTERFACE MESSAGE PROCESSOR, decsystem10, digital PDP-10 (also in tie dye!), digital pdp11, IMLAC, GENERAL TURTLE INC., bbn Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. TENEX, Multics: IF YOU LIKE IT SO MUCH WHY DON'T YOU PUT EIGHT RINGS ON IT, MUDDLE 39 IN OPERATION. LISTENING-AT-LEVEL 1 PROCESS 1, INTERLISP, FOONLY, X Window System Screen Background + X Cursor [wretch!], and more!
https://techsquare.myspreadshop.com/all
I had an even uglier X-Windows t-shirt that I got at the first X11 conference at MIT. It was simply a black and white screen dump with a bunch of incredibly hideous Athena Widgets apps (aka the Anathema Toolkit) like the original X11 netnews and email readers, the infamous butt-ugly xfontsel font selector (for selecting butt-ugly-fonts-with-butt-ugly-logical-font-description-names), and xterm, xlogo, xclock, xcalc, etc, on an audacious lime green background, and I loved to wear it to show off how terrible X-Windows was, and totally wore it out. If anyone still has one I'd pay good money for it!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Xfontsel.png
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_logical_font_description
Here's what happens to xcalc if you stretch it around too much -- its layout manager loses its elasticity and begins to look like Donatella Versace after her 10th botched plastic surgery attempt:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/x-window...
To mitigate that problem, I hacked the OLWM window manager so I could run it with a window id parameter to use as the root window, and gave it xcalc's client window id, so it wrapped frames around each of the buttons, and I could drag them around and resize them to repair the damage, make the important ones really big, arrange the digits in any order, and even iconify the buttons I didn't need. But that was even uglier with the OPEN LOOK frames around each button, and was a far cry from HyperCard.