The Jupiter project was to be a successor to Digital Equipment Corporation ( DEC )' s PDP-10 mainframe computer model.

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.

The PDP-10 was as much a success as the PDP-6 was a failure ; during its lifetime about 700 mainframe PDP-10s were sold before production ended in 1984.

The PDP-10 was widely used in university settings, and thus was the basis of many advances in computing and operating system design during the 1970s.

One of the most unusual peripherals produced for the PDP-10 was the DECtape.

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 F-1 was the fastest PDP-10 ever built, with a clock rate of 90-100 ns per cycle, but only one was ever made.

The PDP-10 machine AI at MIT, which was running the ITS operating system and which was connected to the Arpanet, provided an early hacker meeting point.

Colossal Cave Adventure, created in 1975 by Will Crowther on a DEC PDP-10 computer, was the first widely used adventure game.

MIST ran until the machine that hosted it, a PDP-10, was superseded in early 1991.

The PDP-10 was a mainframe computer family manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation ( DEC ) from the late 1960s on ; the name stands for " Programmed Data Processor model 10 ".

The PDP-10 architecture was an almost identical version of the earlier PDP-6 architecture, sharing the same 36-bit word length and slightly extending the instruction set ( but with improved hardware implementation ).

The original PDP-10 processor was the KA10, introduced in 1968.

The original PDP-10 operating system was simply called " Monitor ", but was later renamed TOPS-10.

Eventually the PDP-10 system itself was renamed the DECsystem-10.

Another modification made to the PDP-10 by CompuServe engineers was the replacement of the hundreds of incandescent indicator lamps on the KI10 processor cabinet with LED lamp modules.

The PDP-10 was eventually eclipsed by the VAX superminicomputer machines ( descendants of the PDP-11 ) when DEC recognized that the PDP-10 and VAX product lines were competing with each other and decided to concentrate its software development effort on the more profitable VAX.

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.

This event spelled the doom of ITS and the technical cultures that had spawned the original jargon file, but by the 1990s it had become something of a badge of honor among old-time hackers to have cut one's teeth on a PDP-10.

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 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.

One song he composed has been published in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery ( CACM ) (" The Telnet Song ," April 1984, a parody of the behavior of a series of PDP-10 TELNET implementations written by Mark Crispin ).

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.

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.

Systems Concepts ( now the SC Group ) is a company co-founded by Stewart Nelson and Mike Levitt focused on making hardware products related to the DEC PDP-10 series of computers.

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

Instead, a group led by Charles P. Thacker designed and constructed two PDP-10 clone systems named " MAXC " ( pronounced " Max ", in honour of Max Palevsky, who had sold SDS to Xerox ) for their own use.

See the " References " section on the LISP article — the 36-bit word size of the PDP-6 and PDP-10 was influenced by the programming convenience of having 2 LISP pointers, each 18 bits, in one word.

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 popular typesetting system TeX by Donald E. Knuth was written in WEB, the original literate programming system, based on DEC PDP-10 Pascal, while applications like Total Commander, Skype and Macromedia Captivate were written in Delphi ( Object Pascal ).

In 1975 by Will Crowther created Colossal Cave Adventure on a DEC PDP-10 computer.

The original version was limited by the 18-bit word address of the PDP-10, and considerable effort was expended in keeping the implementation lean and simple.

The TOPS-20 operating system by Digital Equipment Corporation ( DEC ) was the second proprietary OS for the PDP-10 mainframe computer.

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

This plan eventually backfired ; by this point TENEX was one of the most popular PDP-10 operating systems, and it would not run on the new machines.

The company objectives were twofold: to provide in-house computer processing support to Golden United Life Insurance ; and to develop as an independent business in the computer time-sharing industry, by renting time on its PDP-10 midrange computers during business hours.

The Altair BASIC interpreter was developed by Microsoft founders Paul Allen and Bill Gates with help from Monte Davidoff, using a self made Intel 8080 software simulator running on a PDP-10 minicomputer.

MITS would supply the computer time necessary for development on a PDP-10 owned by the Albuquerque school district.

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.

The design for Foonly contributed greatly to the design of the PDP-10 model KL10.

Third-party attempts to sell PDP-10 clones were relatively unsuccessful ; see Foonly, Systems Concepts, and XKL.