The PDP-1 was supplied standard with 4096 words of core memory, 18-bits per word, and ran at a basic speed of 100, 000 operations per second.

When DEC introduced the PDP-1, they also mentioned larger machines at 24, 30 and 36-bits, based on the same design.

The new machine, the first outside the PDP-1 mould, was introduced at WESTCON on 11 August 1963.

The design of the PDP-1 was based on the pioneering TX-0 computer, designed and built at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

PDP-1 # 44 was found in a barn in Wichita, Kansas in 1988, apparently formerly owned by one of the many aviation companies in the area, and rescued for the Digital Historical Collection, also eventually ending up at the CHM.

* History of the PDP-1 at Stanford University

* Photo of PDP-1 at LRNL.

* MIT PDP-1 Time-sharing System Documentation at bitsavers. org

* Stanford PDP-1 Documentation at bitsavers. org

One such system had been developed for the PDP-1 at MIT by Daniel Murphy before he joined BBN.

The first version of DDT was developed at MIT for the PDP-1 computer in 1961, but newer versions on newer platforms continued to use the same name.

in which two space ships, controlled by toggle switches on the PDP-1, would fly around the screen and shoot torpedoes at each other.

When he first got into MIT he was intent on making the Dean's List, but by his sophomore year he flunked out, because he was spending too much time hacking relay circuits at the TMRC and programming for the PDP-1.

After seeing the PDP-1 prototype at the December 1959, Eastern Joint Computer Conference in Boston, Fredkin recommended that BBN purchase a PDP-1 to support Licklider ’ s research into psychoacoustics.

Working directly with DEC, Fredkin and others at BBN made significant modifications to the PDP-1.

Greenblatt felt compelled to implement a Fortran compiler for the PDP-1, which did not have one at the time.

Steve " Slug " Russell is a programmer and computer scientist most famous for creating Spacewar !, one of the earliest videogames, in 1961 with the fellow members of the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT working on a DEC Digital PDP-1.

* The Lincoln Laboratory TX-0, an early experimental transistor-based minicomputer, which was to be a seminal influence on hacker culture at MIT in the late 1950s prior to the introduction of the PDP-1.

The legendary PDP-1 at MIT, where early computer hacker culture developed, adopted multiple DECtape drives to support a primitive software sharing community.

He was involved in early work on time-sharing through the PDP-1 which his research group owned at MIT ; that hardware later became famous in computer science history as the machine on which hacker culture started.

Expensive Typewriter was a text editing program that ran on the DEC PDP-1 computer that had been recently delivered at MIT.

In the spirit of an earlier editor, named " Colossal Typewriter ", it was called " Expensive Typewriter " because at the time the PDP-1 cost a lot of money ( approximately 100, 000 USD ).

Only three PDP-1 computers are still known to exist, and all three are in the collection of the Computer History Museum ( CHM ).

* Restoring the DEC PDP-1 Computer Exhibit — The Computer History Museum's restoration project

* CHM Archives – The Computer History Museum's Moving Image resources on their PDP-1 and the restoration project.

on the Computer History Museum's PDP-1, 2007

Computer Science House's " Internet Coke Machine " was listed as # 3 in a list of " The Ten Greatest Hacks of All Time " in PC Magazine, behind NASA's efforts to save Apollo 13 and the PDP-1 game Spacewar!

The museum has several additional exhibits, including a Difference Engine designed by Charles Babbage in the 1840s and constructed by the Science Museum, a restoration of a historic PDP-1 minicomputer, and a new exhibit on Google Street View and the history of " surrogate travel ".

A PDP-1 system, with Steve Russell, developer of Spacewar!

This is a canonical example of the PDP-1, with the console typewriter on the left, CPU and main control panel in the center, the Type 30 display on the right.

The PDP-1 was built mostly of DEC 1000-series System Building Blocks, using Micro-Alloy and Micro-Alloy-Diffused transistors with a rated switching speed of 5 MHz.

PDP-1 Type 30 point-mode CRT display and console typewriter, with processor frame in background.

Offline devices were typically Friden Flexowriters that had been specially built to operate with the FIO-DEC character coding used by the PDP-1.

MIT hackers also used the PDP-1 for playing music in four-part harmony, using some special hardware — four flip-flops directly controlled by the processor ( the audio signal was filtered with simple RC filters ).

At the museum's PDP-1 restoration celebration in May 2006, Alan Kotok said his Macintosh PowerBook G4 laptop was 10, 000 times faster, came with 100, 000 times the RAM and 500, 000 times the storage, was 1 / 2000 the size, and cost 1 / 100 as much.

Interestingly, the PDP-1 has a hardware built-in loader, such that an operator need only push the " load " switch to instruct the paper tape reader to load a program directly into core memory ; the boot loader reads into core memory either the second-stage boot loader ( called Binary Loader of paper tape with checksum ) or the operating system from an outside storage medium such as a paper tape, a punched card, or a disk drive.

Steve “ Slug ” Russell was another PDP-1 hacker that came up with a 2D game called Spacewar!

He created the MCWS because he wanted to add an instruction to the PDP-1 computer, and the lab administrators had forbidden anyone “ not qualified ” from messing with the computer hardware.

Wesley Allison Clark ( born 1927 ) is a computer scientist and one of the main participants, along with Charles Molnar, in the creation of the LINC laboratory computer, which was the first mini-computer and shares with a number of other computers ( such as the PDP-1 ) the claim to be the inspiration for the personal computer.

The PDP-1 was also the original hardware for playing history's first game on a minicomputer, Steve Russell's Spacewar !.

* The Dot Eaters entry on the PDP-1 and its use in the development of the first videogame, Spacewar!

* PDP-1 emulator in Java running Spacewar!

It is based on Spacewar !, a PDP-1 program.