OT - sort of

Rich Alderson wrote: It wasn't really build-it-yourself. It was wire-it-to-industrial-controls-and-program-it-yourself, which isn't that much different than the PDP-8 and PDP-11 systems intended for lab or industrial use. The big difference is that the PDP-14 is programmed using ladder logic; it's basically a PLC. The PDP-16 was build-it-yourself, but wasn't necessarily a computer. It was called "Register Transfer Modules". It would typically be hardwired rather than having a stored program. The general approach was asynchronous logic as previously used in various processors such as the KA10. Each functional unit sends a pulse to trigger the next unit in the flow. However, there was a "standard" PDP-16 computer, the PDP-16/M. I doubt that they shipped very many, as it was more expensive than a PDP-11/05 but less powerful and DEC had no supporting software. Those were the system names; the processor was still called a PDP-10, and the specific processor models were known by their option names, KA10, KI10, KL10, and KS10. Eric