The PDP-8 was the first sucessful commercial minicomputer, produced by DEC in the 60s, the first real minicomputer, and the first computer costing less than $20,000.
By late 1973 to 77, the PDP-8 family was the best selling computer in the world. The basic version could sit on a desktop rather than requiring cumbersome racks well known at the time. This compact size caused it to become a popular system in scientific laboratories.
The machine had a now quite strange 12-bit word and four thousand 12-bit words of magnetic core memory. The first model was built without any Integrated circuit - thus no microprocessor - but with discrete transistors mounted on numerous small printed circuit boards called 'flip chips' that were inserted on two backplanes mounted vertically. Both table-top and rack-mount models were available, but adding additional memory required a rack.
CPU was composed of 12 interlinked Register Boards each operating on one bit slice of the 12 bit word and containing an Adder function together with all the major registers - MB, MA, AC, PC. Speed a little less than 1MHz.
The instructions set of the PDP-8 was very limited, only eight basic instructions encoded by the three left bits of each 12-bit word, and one register, the accumulator: However, the PDP-8 could be programmed to do almost anything. It just took longer (sometimes very longer!) to execute programs.
A 110 baud current loop teletype interface allowed an ASR 33 Teletype to be connected, serving as a console as well as a storage device by means of the built-in papertape puncher and reader.
There were numerous variations of the original model over the years, among them:
1966: PDP-8/S - minimum price but slow memory serial logic design
1968: PDP-8/I - first version with integrated circuits
1970: PDP-8/E - New bus structure design called Omnibus
1975: PDP-8/A - Allowed OEMs choice of memory type and quantity
All together, about 50,000 PDP-8 series computers were sold, as well as numerous clones made USA, Asia and East European countries.
In 2000 year, there were still a few PDP8's in operation, mainly in third-world countries.
Please consider donating your old computer / videogame system to Old-Computers.com or one of our partners from anywhere in the world (Europe, America, Asia, etc.).
Hi folks! I''m from Russia which in past was USSR - we worked on PDP 11/70 series machine in Moscow State University at the Department of Math and Mechanics in 1985-1990. These were indeed great times for us students to program on PDP using mostly Macro Assembler and C++ when it later was also enabled on this multi-user machine. We experimented with FORTRAN to calculate differential equations and find better applications for serious tasks in computing the big data. We also had quite a lot of TETRIS, SNAKE games on our hard disk and we used $UIC$ user entry system which allowed user to RUN and DEBUG the programs - there had been BUILDER of EXE files and this was not too easy to cope. While RSX operating system was quite a fun. All commands we used were well documented and helpful. We even tried to a bit hack the RSX shell to enter as highest priority user while this was only to "improve" our skills in the RSX system engine, And this system was and still IS state of the art I would suggest. I had SO many nice experience in general understanding of how OS works, what it''s core is and how system of machine commands works as one Orchestra. These WERE the times folks!!!! Br Oleg from Moscow
Thursday 28th November 2019
Oleg Kuznetsov (Russia)
The first two of the first three machines I ever worked on were PDP-8''s. A PDP-8A in my high school freshman year in a computer math class and a PDP-8E in my junior and senior years in a computer science/data processing vocational program. They were incredible machines for their time. The one in the vocational program had 2 removable rk05e''s and an rk05f hard drives attached and had 15 terminals attached that could all be used at the same time! It did this with only 32k word memory (appx 48k bytes)! It used an operating system called ''ETOS'' which used the rk05f (5MB fixed version) for virtual memory, one of the rk05e''s for the OS and languages (BASIC, DIBOL, COBOL, and Fortran IV) and the other rk05e for data files.
Friday 26th December 2014
Chuck Rose (Vermont, USA)
I am currently leading a group of students in an attempt to restore PDP-8 serial number 85 to operating condition. Our restoration project log is on the web at: $ http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/pdp8/UI-8/ We''re posting photos of our work $ currently the focus is on reforming the capacitors in the power supply so we can turn it on. That will take a while, since we had to disassemble quite a bit just to get to some of them.
