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◈ALB Atlas

PDP-11 Dead

PDP-11
KindMachine
Introduced1970
Discontinued1997
StatusDead
ManufacturerDigital Equipment Corporation
ClassMinicomputer
Platform16-bit, Unibus
Sourcebitsavers.org ↗

The most influential minicomputer ever — 600,000 sold, the machine C was designed for and Unix grew up on. The x86 is arguably the only more consequential architecture since.

Created by Digital Equipment Corporation
Hosted Research Unix RSTS/E RSX-11 RT-11

DEC's 16-bit masterpiece — Harold McFarland's orthogonal instruction set, the Unibus backplane, over 600,000 sold across two decades of models (LSI-11, PDP-11/34 through /84, MicroPDP).

Unix moved to a PDP-11/20 in 1970 and C was designed for it — the language's byte addressability, pre/post increment, and register model all reflect this hardware. No single machine has had more influence on the systems world.

Sources

  1. bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-11