It's great to see Stacken's old machine being taken care of and tinkered with, I'm sure some of our older members will be thrilled to see this. For the past 20 years we sadly haven't had space for minicomputers or mainframes, though for a while we were planning to run an emulated PDP-10 with ITS or something (project on hold due both to the emulated system's clock drifting dramatically and the VT220 I was using spontaneously breaking very subtly: key commands don't transmit anything, but everything else works). I'm too young to have used any of these machines myself for anything approaching real work, but I can't help but be fascinated by them.
Nice to see they let MIT-MC outside to run in the sun. Free range mainframes are the happiest mainframes.
Incredible project! It would be amazing to have this machine up and running, I never thought that would even be possible. I wonder about your electricity bills though :-)
That's Peter's old machine! Used to be in the care of Stacken, the computer club at Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. It's named Kicki because of the dual CPUs (KI KI). She had a sister named Katia ("a ten" in Swedish is "tia" and she had a KA CPU).
According to DEC you could only run one KI CPU, and then changed that when challenged to MAX two CPUs. So briefly she ran with three.
I remember seeing this machine (or one like it, but how many dual-processor pdp-10’s can there have been?) at Stacken sometime around the mid-90’s. Even then, it was a relic from a bygone era. Strange to think that the computers that were brand new then are now older than this was at the time. Damn, I’m getting old…