26 Nov
2014
26 Nov
'14
4:43 p.m.
From: Rich Alderson
We have a non-running 1090 here at the museum
Oh, good, then you have a machine to run ITS on (along with ones for WAITS
and Tops-10! :-)
Just kidding (mostly); ITS did run on a KL (without hardware mods), but I'm
not sure which model it was; it was a pretty early one. I know it had the
external memory bus, and I _think_ it had the RH20s (I know it had RP's of
some kind, I think MassBus, because one of them was dual-ported and the
console 11 booted off of it, and I don't think it had whatever PDP-10 disk
controller the KA's had). I guess it was a KL-B, then?
Whichever one it was, anyone who wanted to run ITS on a KL would probably want
the same model - I know ITS had custom microcode (in part to emulate the MIT
pager, which had a different page size from the BBN/DEC one, and also because
ITS used some custom instructions which had been added to the KA's), and
although one could probably get that to run on a different model KL, it might
be (an unknown amount of) work.
But, completely seriously, ITS is an amazing system, and although there are a
few running on simulators, I'm not sure anyone has it running on real
hardware. That would be Very Cool.
Noel