No such thing as "the PDP" [was RE: Typesafety versus Worse is Better - was Re: Fwd: is there any word processing software for the pdp11?]

[Mark Wickens]

Fair point Rich - and greetings to you too! I'm guessing here I'm talking
about a PDP-11 of some description, but I still have yet to step my toes in
that particular pond. I get the feeling I'll sink fast!

Mark.

On 4 December 2014 at 20:03, Rich Alderson <RichA at livingcomputermuseum.org>
wrote:

> From: Mark Wickens
> Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2014 12:47 AM
>
> > Has anyone considered whether it would be possible to port lua to the
> > PDP?
>
> You know, there never was (or only for a very short time) such a thing
> as "the PDP".  DEC produced systems with 5 different architectures (or
> 4.5, if you lump the two 18-bit architectures together; I usually do)
> under the rubric "PDP-<small integer>":  The PDP-1, the PDP-4/7/9/15,
> the PDP-5/8 family, the PDP-6/10 family, and the PDP-11 family.  I would
> argue that only the original PDP-1 could rightly be called "the PDP",
> but even then, DEC had designed the 24-bit PDP-2 and the 36-bit PDP-3
> which they did not build themselves, for a total of 7 architectures
> designated "PDP".
>
> Back when I was doing sales support for XKL, a lovely lady who did
> consulting in the oil industry advised me that we should be selling the
> Toad-1 in that market "because there are PDPs *everywhere* in the fields!"
>
> (Steps off soap box, walks away from Hyde Park.)
>
> (Hi, Mark! ;-)
>
>                                                                 Rich
>
>
> Rich Alderson
> Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
> Living Computer Museum
> 2245 1st Avenue S
> Seattle, WA 98134
>
> mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
>
> http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/
>