PDP-10 - Cancellation and Influence

Cancellation and Influence

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.

The PDP-10 assembly language instructions LDB and DPB (load/deposit byte) live on as functions in the programming language Common Lisp. 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.

Will Crowther created Adventure, the prototypical computer adventure game, for a PDP-10. Don Daglow created the first computer baseball game (1971) and Dungeon (1975), the first role-playing video game on a PDP-10. Walter Bright originally created Empire for the PDP-10. Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle created the first MUD on a PDP-10. In addition, Zork was written on the PDP-10, and Infocom used several PDP-10s for game development and testing.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen originally wrote Altair BASIC using an Intel 8080 emulator running on a PDP-10 in Harvard University. They founded Microsoft shortly after.