larsbrinkhoff

I'm curious about that 940. Was that at BBN, or where? At what point in time did you see it? Why was is a spare; had it been decommissioned?

I wonder if they were aware Patrick Suppes' group at Stanford was doing Logo already in the 1960s. They used Imlacs for turtle graphics, the very same Douglas Hofstadter used to edit his manuscript for "Gödel, Escher, Bach".

Logo basically grew up on PDP-10 and PDP-11 computers at MIT. The workhorse system at the AI lab was ITS. The Logo group, which was part of the AI lab, had their own PDP-11/45 for which they created a "Small ITS" timesharing system, which was cross assembled from ITS.

A list of all Logo memos, with links where I could find them.

https://github.com/pdp11/sits/wiki/List-of-Logo-memos

The elevator and door hardware was in the TV-11. The IO pins are available in the emulator, but alas not connected to anything.

I have heard about the wire wrapping robot, but not who made it. The boards were made by Augat.

Sorry to be pedantic here, but that LCM computer is not a DEC-2020, and by looks of it, not the one in the photo either. The 2020 is a small machine with the KS10 processor. The ones in the photos look like some larger KL10 based DEC-20 models: 2040, 2050, 2060, or 2065.

Terry and SHRDLU at 8:23 here: https://archive.org/details/what-about-tomorrow-on-the-side-...

See this for some more information: https://github.com/PDP-10/its/issues/425#issuecomment-145588...

Besides ITS proper, there were many subsystems that were more or less tied to ITS, some of them with their own operating systems. Others like the TV and XGP had dedicated PDP-11 computers running special software.

Just to list a bunch: PDP-6, Logo PDP-11/45, Minsky's 2500, Imlac PDS-1, GT40, Robotics PDP-11/40.

Another fun tidbit related to this is that there were two prononciations of "ITS". The AI lab (where ITS originated) and the adjoining Project MAC slash LCS PDP-10s running ITS pronounced it as an acronym: "eye tee ess". But the Dynamic Modeling group (also in Project MAC), who were the first to adopt ITS outside the AI lab and had offices a few floors down, called it "its". I only learned about this recently when I talked to former DM people on video.

I have tried several versions of SHRDLU, binary and source, but so far I haven't found one that works. Some people claim it never really worked well. Winograd himself seems to think it did, and there is what seems to be a working demo in a 1973 TV documentary. Others say it needed heavy manual patching to be somewhat usable, and those patches didn't make it to the source code files.

It's hard to convey in words how convenient this is. Sometimes when you're debugging, you want to do file system things. In Unix you'd somehow switch out of the debugger to the shell (type ^Z or switch window, or something), do the thing, and then go back. With ITS you can just do it right away, and it somehow feels so right. Similarly, the debugger-shell has built-in math operators, so it can be your desktop calculator without switching context.

The system is wide open to a fault, even extending to the "kernel" memory image being available for debugging with just a few keystrokes.

In theory. As far as I know, attempts were made to resurrect this, but didn't get all the way there.

https://github.com/paulnank/nankervis-pdp10-js/issues/1#issu...

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514918

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25869880

Do you mean how Microsoft "borrowed" time on PDP-10 computers that were not theirs? I believe they got a DEC-2020 (KS10) later. Ms Piggy was a PDP-11, right?

(Not to contradict you in any way.) TeX, originally written in the SAIL language, was rewritten in Pascal around 1982. Was the CS and AI departments merged at that time?

Chaosnet today: https://chaosnet.net/

Production scheduled for July.

Oops, URL should be https://github.com/PDP-10/its/pull/2150

The PDP-10 MDL compiler has been recovered from MIT backup tapes, and is now used to recompile the original 1981 version of "mainframe" Zork source code.

Get Zork instead of Dungeon. It's closer... it is the original concept.

Some of those maps show the original Zork that ran in 256K of 36-bit words.

Model F2 seems right: https://github.com/PDP-10/FOONEX/blob/master/F2-MICROCODE/DS...

First .com, not first domain name ever.

Another copy.

https://pasteboss.com/ihole-game/

Is this it, further down the page?

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/2684207-an-open-...

I'm curious about what various people think defines a mainframe. IBM people clearly have something in mind, and DEC people something else. Maybe DG had yet another definition.

"How Emacs fits inside of Unix philosophy"

I see this time and again. Why is there a need to fit Emacs inside the Unix philosophy? I think it's perfectly fine if it doesn't.

Although Franz Inc supported Franz Lisp and developed Allegro Common Lisp, it is my impression they are distinct implementations. I can't find any hard evidence one way or another. Do you know?

If you use ITS for a while, you'll understand why Emacs is like it is. Also some of the other GNU projects.

Clearly it's blocking subversive network information.