17 Aug
2025
17 Aug
'25
12:21 a.m.
The RFC refers to "the Harvard PDP-10 System" and "Harvard's
PDP-1" in
the first paragraph, and the "MITDG PDP-6/10" (so that's 2 machines but
eventually MIT had a gaggle of PDP-10s) in the second paragraph. And
of course MIT had a PDP-1, where Spacewar was developed and first
played. I don't know the arrival/exit dates of the machines.
Here are some dates, but I don't know if they are just samples based on
the earliest DECUS submission from there, or installation dates. The
Harvard museum (which has pieces of the Mark I) may know more about when
different machines were installed and removed.
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp1/PDP-1_SerialNumbers.txt
Sites known to have PDP-1's based on DECUS
submissions:
...
Harvard University Dec 64
...
MIT Lincoln Laboratory Group 22 May 65
MIT Laboratory For Nuclear Science Apr 65
MIT Project MAC Jul 64
MIT RLE Sep 65
By serial number:
05 PDP-1C MIT (RLE)
26 PDP-1C MIT
37 PDP-1C MIT Lincoln Labs 11/65
40 PDP-1C MIT (MAC) 64(?)
41 PDP-1C Harvard
53 PDP-1 MIT
Side note: I saw the MIT PDP-6 with its chess trophies on top of it
during the Blizzard of '78. (After I interviewed at DEC, I made my way
from Marlborough through the rapidly-intensifying snow to Cambridge to
visit someone from High School. I ended up crashing on a dorm sofa from
the day the blizzard hit until the airport in Boston reopened which was
about a week.) The PDP-6 had a sign on it that said something like
"This machine is old and flaky so don't touch it unless you know what
you are doing."
- Aron
On 8/16/25 10:57, Clem Cole wrote:
Right. What I do not know is what early machines
Harvard had from
DEC. MIT had the 18 and 36 bit series which was what I was implying.
The key point though is that if Harvard was the root of the PTY tree
it would have been on one of those systems not a Unix system because
Unix did not come to Harvard until 1974 and RFC 89 was 1971 and RFC 46
in 1970
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
On Fri, Aug 15, 2025 at 8:50 PM Aron Insinga <aki(a)insinga.com> wrote:
The https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc89 mentions a PDP-6
and PDP-10s which are 36-bit twos complement machines, and a DEC
PDP-1 which was an 18-bit one's complement machine. The
"graphics-oriented" PDP-1 probably had the well-known Type 30
display which used a large round radar-type CRT thanks to the
Project SAGE tradition, but there were a couple of other graphics
display options for the PDP-1.
https://www.computerhistory.org/pdp-1/graphics/
- Aron
On 8/15/25 23:35, Clem Cole wrote:
Watch the dates - that's not UNIX. In
1973, Version 4 Unix is
first released outside of BTL, so the Harvard system being talked
about in RFC 89 is probably an 18 bit ??PDP6 maybe??.
On Fri, Aug 15, 2025 at 8:24 PM Bakul Shah via TUHS
<tuhs(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
From RFC 89 (dated 19 January 1971) titled "Some historic
moments in networking":
Second, the Harvard system has temporarily implemented
this remote
network console interface feature using a DEC style
pseudo-teletype
(PTY).
From RFC 46 (dated April 1970) titled "'ARPA Network Protocol
Notes":
3. A standard way for a newly created process to initiate
pseudo-
typewriter communication with the foreign process which
requested
its creation.
On Aug 15, 2025, at 6:49 PM, ron minnich
<rminnich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
was there ever a telnet or other remote access program that
predated ptys on Unix? Was telnet the driving force for
ptys? Did the folks implementing Unix networking bring in
ptys before, or as part of, or after networking, i.e. did
folks building networking for Unix realize they needed ptys
once they started working on telnet, or did they plan for
ptys from the get go? I was an observer for some of this
stuff, but as a 20-year-old at UDEL I was also quite out of
the loop.
I also realize there were multiple Unix networking efforts,
so this question is somewhat simplistic.
I'm assuming rsh came a bit later.
On Fri, Aug 15, 2025 at 4:19 PM Tom Lyon <pugs78(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Yeah, I was thinking that 4.1c BSD must've had them for
rlogin and telnet.
Which got me looking for Fabry and Bill Joy's
design/planning documents for 4.2, which are not in the
TUHS archives.
Anyone got them??
On Fri, Aug 15, 2025 at 4:15 PM Warner Losh
<imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
At the very least, 4.2BSD had them for telnet and
rlogin. They were static, though. You had to MAKEDEV
enough units.
Warner
On Fri, Aug 15, 2025, 5:00 PM ron minnich
<rminnich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
That was my guess. I figured the people who did
the work are on this list, and primary sources rule.
On Fri, Aug 15, 2025 at 3:56 PM Ron Natalie
<ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
I think that wikipedia history is somewhat
garbled when it comes to the UNIX
implementations.