This old system, a ginormous DEC-10, is on eBay, currently at $25k with a day and a half left.
Pretty spiffy!
4 thoughts on “PDP-10 on eBay”
NIce computer. I’ve work with those in the past. A real nice operating system (TOPS-20) runs on them. You could put 100 people on that computer in the old days. It’s a 36 bit maching BTW. You don’t see many of those any more. 🙂
Oh yeah that is a PDP-20 not a PDP-10. KL10 is the CPU not the system. The early PDP-10s used the KA10 CPU. I believe only the very late PDP-10s used the KL10 CPU.
He mentions that it comes with an Ethernet card, and makes a passing allusion to how you could set it up on the Internet.
I’d LOVE to set one of those up as a webserver. 😉
Wikipedia says 4096 megawords of storage, which is somewhat unfortunate since a “word” isn’t a fixed-length… But unless I’m missing something, that’s actually an impressive amount of storage — 4096 mega-* would be 4 giga-*, and a word seems to be 8+ bits, meaning that this thing has at least 4GB of storage, and likely more since an 8-bit word would be pretty worthless?
Hey, that’s probably enough to install Vista! But, uhh, where does the DVD go? (I’d LOVE to try calling tech support complaining that various modern software applications aren’t running…)
Words on a PDP-20 were/are 36 bits. There once were lots of these on the Internet. Also in Decnet one connected to anohter computer using the SET HOST command. Well there was an undocumented feature that let you use SET HOSTESS because there was a key machine called TWINKY. The reason for the allowed extra letters should be obvious. 🙂
NIce computer. I’ve work with those in the past. A real nice operating system (TOPS-20) runs on them. You could put 100 people on that computer in the old days. It’s a 36 bit maching BTW. You don’t see many of those any more. 🙂
Oh yeah that is a PDP-20 not a PDP-10. KL10 is the CPU not the system. The early PDP-10s used the KA10 CPU. I believe only the very late PDP-10s used the KL10 CPU.
He mentions that it comes with an Ethernet card, and makes a passing allusion to how you could set it up on the Internet.
I’d LOVE to set one of those up as a webserver. 😉
Wikipedia says 4096 megawords of storage, which is somewhat unfortunate since a “word” isn’t a fixed-length… But unless I’m missing something, that’s actually an impressive amount of storage — 4096 mega-* would be 4 giga-*, and a word seems to be 8+ bits, meaning that this thing has at least 4GB of storage, and likely more since an 8-bit word would be pretty worthless?
Hey, that’s probably enough to install Vista! But, uhh, where does the DVD go? (I’d LOVE to try calling tech support complaining that various modern software applications aren’t running…)
Words on a PDP-20 were/are 36 bits. There once were lots of these on the Internet. Also in Decnet one connected to anohter computer using the SET HOST command. Well there was an undocumented feature that let you use SET HOSTESS because there was a key machine called TWINKY. The reason for the allowed extra letters should be obvious. 🙂