MIST ran until the machine that hosted it, a PDP-10, was superseded in early 1991.

; PDP-10: 36-bit timesharing machine, and fairly successful over several different models.

The classic implementation was on the PDP-10 ; it has been used to study compilers, formal grammars, and artificial intelligence, especially machine translation and machine comprehension of natural languages.

Learning from this mistake, the DEC sales manager in charge of the PDP-10 line managed to purchase the rights to TENEX from BBN and set up a project to port it to the new machine.

* Block-transfer instruction, a machine language instruction for PDP-10 computers

Harvard officials were not pleased that Gates and Allen ( who was not a student ) had used the PDP-10 to develop a commercial product, but determined that this military computer was not covered by any Harvard policy ; the PDP-10 was controlled by Professor Thomas Cheatham, who felt that students could use the machine for personal use.

These PDP-10 machine dependencies made porting of the Crowther / Woods Adventure to other platforms more difficult.

The default ITS top-level command interpreter was the PDP-10 machine language debugger ( DDT ).

* All constants are full word for the machine being used, e. g. on a 16-bit machine such as the PDP-11, a constant is 16 bits ; on a VAX computer, constants are 32 bits, and on a PDP-10, a constant is 36 bits.

is a semantic routine which respectively takes as its arguments a PDP-10 machine language opcode, a register object, and any other object, and produces an object whose value is the result of executing the designated machine instruction using as address field the object which is its last argument.

The programmer subculture of hackers has stories about several hardware hacks in its folklore, such as a mysterious ' magic ' switch attached to a PDP-10 computer in MIT's AI lab, that, when turned off, crashed the computer.

But as integrated circuit technology shrank the size and cost of computers in the 1960s and early 1970s, and the memory requirements of AI programs started to exceed the address space of the most common research computer, the DEC PDP-10, researchers considered a new approach: a computer designed specifically to develop and run large artificial intelligence programs, and tailored to the semantics of the Lisp programming language.

Nonetheless, it now runs on PDP-10 emulators and can be used for experimenting with early AI programs.

While this was going on, Stanford University AI programmers, many of them MIT alumni, were working on their own project to build a PDP-10 that was ten times faster than the original KA-10.

In the 1950s-1970s the AI Group shared a computer room with a computer ( initially a PDP-6, and later a PDP-10 ) for which they built a time-sharing operating system called ITS.

When the Flip Chip packaging allowed the PDP-6 to be re-implemented at a much lower cost, DEC took the opportunity to carry out a similar evolution of their 36-bit design and introduced the PDP-10 in 1968.

In fact, some PDP-10 systems had no disks at all, using DECtapes alone for their primary data storage.

Don Daglow wrote an enhanced version of the program called Ecala on a PDP-10 mainframe computer at Pomona College in 1973 before writing what was possibly the second or third computer role-playing game, Dungeon ( 1975 ) ( The first was probably " dnd ", written on and for the PLATO system in 1974, and the second may have been Moria, written in 1975 ).

The PDP-10 successor was to have been built by the Super Foonly project at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory ( SAIL ) along with a new operating system.

Inspired by Adventure, a group of students at MIT wrote a game called Zork in the summer of 1977 for the PDP-10 minicomputer which became quite popular on the ARPANET.

In 1978 Roy Trubshaw, a student at Essex University in the UK, started working on a multi-user adventure game in the MACRO-10 assembly language for a DEC PDP-10.

In 1971 to 1972 researchers at Xerox PARC were frustrated by top company management's refusal to let them purchase a PDP-10.

The PDP-10 product line cancellation was announced in 1983, including cancelling the on-going Jupiter project to produce a new high-end PDP-10 processor ( despite that project being in good shape at the time of the cancellation ) and the Minnow project to produce a desktop PDP-10, which may then have been at the prototyping stage.

* PDP-10 software archive at Trailing Edge

TOPS-20 was preferred by most PDP-10 users over TOPS-10 ( at least by those who were not ITS or WAITS partisans ).

NASA also decided to replace the B6500 with a PDP-10, which were in common use at Ames, but this required the development of new compilers and support software.

By early March, Paul Allen, Bill Gates, and Monte Davidoff, another Harvard student, had created a BASIC interpreter that worked under simulation on a PDP-10 mainframe computer at Harvard.

Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Monte Davidoff did use a PDP-10 at Harvard's Aiken Computer Center.

Concepts from Project Genie influenced the development of the TENEX operating system for the PDP-10 and Unix ( Unix co-creator Ken Thompson worked on an SDS 940 while at Berkeley ).

WAITS was a heavily-modified variant of Digital Equipment Corporation's Monitor operating system ( later renamed to, and better known as TOPS-10 ) for the PDP-6 and PDP-10 mainframe computers, used at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory ( SAIL ) up until 1990 ; the mainframe computer it ran on also went by the name of " SAIL ".

Interlisp development began in 1967 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts as BBN LISP, which ran on PDP-10 machines running the TENEX operating system.

Gosper left MIT for Stanford where he would study under Donald Knuth, while still hacking on the PDP-10 at Tech Square via ARPAnet.

Mark Crispin seems to claim Digital's name for the color was Terracotta, at least in the context of PDP-10 machines running Tops-20.

Greenblatt, along with Tom Knight and Stewart Nelson, co-wrote the Incompatible Timesharing System, a highly influential timesharing operating system for the PDP-6 and PDP-10 used at MIT.

In 1978, there were half a dozen different operating systems for the PDP-10: ITS ( MIT ), WAITS ( Stanford ), TOPS-10 ( DEC ), CMU TOPS-10 ( Carnegie Mellon ), TENEX ( BBN ), and TOPS-20 ( DEC, based on TENEX ).

Computers with 36-bit words included the MIT Lincoln Laboratory TX-2, the IBM 701 / 704 / 709 / 7090 / 7094, the UNIVAC 1103 / 1103A / 1105 / 1100 / 2200, the General Electric GE-600 / Honeywell 6000, the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-6 / PDP-10 ( as used in the DECsystem-10 / DECSYSTEM-20 ), and the Symbolics 3600 series.

* MIT PDP-10 ' info ' file

* DDT – PDP-10 debugger from DEC used as a command shell for the MIT Incompatible Timesharing System

Some DEC PDP-10 machines stored their microcode in SRAM chips ( about 80 bits wide x 2 Kwords ), which was typically loaded on power-on through some other front-end CPU.

Later on, those systems running TOPS-20 ( on the KL10 PDP-10 processors ) were labeled DECSYSTEM-20 ( the block capitals being the result of a lawsuit brought against DEC by Singer, which once made a computer called " system-10 ").

The PDP-6 supported time sharing through the use of a status bit selecting between two operating modes (" Executive " and " User ", with access to I / O, etc., being restricted in the latter ), and a single relocation / protection register which allowed a user's address space to be limited to a set section of main memory ( a second relocation / protection register for shareable " high segments " was added on the PDP-10 ).

Not long after this rumors started to spread that they were, in fact, working on a new 36-bit design, which was eventually released as the PDP-10.

It required about 60k words ( nearly 300kB ) of core memory, which was a significant amount for PDP-10 / KA systems running with only 128k words.

The local spelling " TURIST " is an artifact of six character filename ( and other identifier ) limitations, which is traceable to the fact that six SIXBIT encoded characters fit in a single 36-bit PDP-10 word.

The most popular type of MMOG, and the sub-genre that pioneered the category, is the massively multiplayer online role playing game ( MMORPG ), which descended from university mainframe computer MUD and adventure games such as Rogue and Dungeon on the PDP-10.

First written for the PDP-10, it was later ported to countless other platforms, including the Atari 2600 video game console, on which it was renamed to Adventure ( 1979 ) and contained action and graphical elements.

For example, the Data General Nova minicomputer, and the Texas Instruments TMS9900 and National Semiconductor IMP-16 microcomputers used 16 bit words, and there were many 36-bit mainframe computers ( e. g., PDP-10 ) which used 18-bit word addressing, not byte addressing, giving an address space of 2 < sup > 18 </ sup > 36-bit words, approximately 1 megabyte of storage.

In the case of early models of the PDP-10, which did not have any cache memory, you could actually load a tight inner loop into the first few words of memory ( the fast registers in fact ), and have it run much faster than if it would have in magnetic core memory.

The first computer game to implement line of sight graphics was Dungeon, which was played on a PDP-10 mainframe computer ( 1975 ).

The PDP-10 architecture has a few instructions which are sensitive ( alter or query the processor's mode ) but not privileged.

Julian Davies, in Edinburgh, implemented an extended version of POP-2, which he called POP-10 on the PDP-10 computer running TOPS-10.

The clients ran on Imlacs which had 50 kbit / s serial connections allowing them to communicate with PDP-10 computers running MIT's Incompatible Timesharing System ( ITS ).